Director Mel Tomlin combines traditional animation with cutting-edge AI to bring visual life to the focus track from the new album ‘Breathing Room, released today.
True August and animator/director Mel Tomlin have just released an animated music video for “Felt It In Stereo,” the focus track for August’s new album Breathing Room. The video, which dropped today alongside the album, reflects the musical artist’s amalgamation of varying techniques, mediums, processes, and arrangements. With interest in the pop genre and its origins, August incorporates historical pop styles and elements with a contemporary essence and experimental aura.
In the year before graduating college during COVID, August used his downtime to dive into production, songwriting, and pop music; the result is his new album, Breathing Room.
"With its makeshift beginnings in my senior year dorm room, Breathing Room has been in the works for over two years,” shared August. “Every single cover so far has loosely resembled a micrograph, a picture of a microscope lens, and this is no mistake. The micrographs convey the colors and textures of different locations in the human body, but also the diversity of emotion that exists within a single person.”
Tomlin, who was tapped to bring August’s song to life, used traditional and cutting-edge techniques to create the visual experience for music video.
“I’ve been animating with Clip Studio Pro for stop-motion and rotoscoping and using Adobe Creative Suite for editing and some special effects,” shared Tomlin. “Amazingly, I didn’t have any technical difficulties on this project. I think the biggest obstacles were my own limitations. There were a lot of learning curves because I was experimenting a lot and trying some techniques that were new to me.”
“Throughout the production of the video, I’d check in and get feedback from Augie, then move forward with any new ideas,” Tomlin noted of the hand-animated video. “It was a great collaboration, and all evolved pretty organically in the end.”
Enjoy True August - Felt It In Stereo:
Debbie Diamond Sarto is news editor at Animation World Network.
