In the fall of 2020, I was a first-semester college student who was stuck at home due to the pandemic. To help conquer some of the loneliness, FOMO, and boredom, I tried to take on projects that tested both my creative and technical skills. I focused on the fairly untapped (at the time) niche of Spotify Canvses, which are the short videos that play in the background of songs on Spotify. My first ever Canvases came from working with my hometown friend Jenna Kopp.

Jenna had recently released a new album called Sunray, which was a country-pop fusion project. The songs had very strong, emotional, intimate themes that I thought would best be reflected in videos, so we went to a nearby farm to shoot a few scenes with my drone.

The first Canvas, for a song called “Busy Minds“, I recorded Jenna playing her guitar in an empty field. After color grading, I then used Procreate to animate a skeleton following her movements, before breaking down into a pile of bones. The song talks about the sadness and loneliness of being separated from someone you used to love, and I felt the skeleton playing guitar was a good metaphor for the expression of both emotions. The breaking down, while a cliche way of illustrating one relenting to fate, gave a meaningful conclusion to the video.

For her title track “Sunray“, I asked Jenna and her partner to wander around the farm acting like lovebirds. “Sunray“ romanticizes love and connection, and I saw no better way to capture that idea than to record Jenna on a date. The video needed no special effects, only a highly saturated color grading requested by the artist.

I am incredibly grateful to have worked with Jenna for my first few projects. I got my first taste of creative direction in the music industry, and finally had the beginning of a strong portfolio of Spotify Canvases. You can listen to Jenna’s music here.