In March of 2023, I completed a 3-minute, full length music video for Good Kid’s single “Mimi’s Delivery Service”. All backgrounds, rough and clean animation, and editing was done by myself. It’s my favourite piece I’ve ever done and it’s the most hardwork I’ve ever poured into an animation.
The story arc of my animation is very similar to the movie that inspired the song: Kiki’s Delivery Service. For context, the movie is about a young witch who leaves her family to live in a new town and start her own delivery service. Along the way, she struggles with self-doubt but learns to believe in herself and find her place in the world. In the end, Kiki becomes a stronger and more independent person.
In the animation, the story is about a girl named Mimi who leaves her hometown with her cat, Neru. She starts her own package delivery service with the help of her robot drones. She loves what she does, but as she works harder, she starts to neglect the care of her drones. One day, while trying to get one of them to fly, Mimi breaks her main drone. With her passion slowly fading, she is unable to fix it, leaving her feeling hopeless. At the low point of the story, she gives up and visits a pawn shop to sell the broken parts for money. However, she then hears about Neru being stuck on a clock tower. With no other option for getting to the top of the tower, she uses the remaining two drones to rescue the cat. This finally gives her the confidence and courage to continue doing what she loves.
I think Kiki’s Delivery Service has a beautiful message about self-esteem and how burnout affects it. As the animator, I think I even went through a similar arc while making the video. I was super enthusiastic for the first two weeks of animating, but burnout started to creep closer and closer the more hours I spent on it. With determination, though, I managed to complete it, and the results were more rewarding than I could have ever imagined.
What elements of the song did I take creative inspiration from?
The main source of inspiration was the lyrics. Throughout the entire animation, I added synced lyrics at the bottom of the screen to resemble English subtitles found in Ghibli films, such as Kiki’s Delivery Service. Key words really helped me with scene planning for the animation. A great example is the lyric, “Every moon that I see you on the rise.” For both pre-choruses, this lyric inspired two visualisations of the same shot of the moon, but at different points in the story arc. The first time, Mimi is happily flying high above the clock tower, while the second time, she’s standing on the ground feeling doubtful of her flying abilities. I think this is even more interesting because of the guitar slide that occurs during this part of the song. That said, I also took a lot of inspiration from the instrumental elements. There are quick scenes throughout the animation where the visual elements on the screen appear with each word of the song being sung. Those scenes are some of my personal favourites that give life and excitement to the video. I had a lot of fun timing them out perfectly.
What was my process in creating the video?
Every animation I create begins with the story. Initially, I started the previsualization phase by jotting down notes about specific story beats I wanted to hit. I planned the story arc on a single sheet of paper and made some rough thumbnails of how I envisioned certain shots. After that, I took those sketches and created a rough storyboard in Storyboard Pro, the software I used to edit the timing of shots along with the song.
Once I had planned out all three minutes of the song, I created a spreadsheet to organise and keep track of the backgrounds I needed to complete. A handful of backgrounds were reused, which really helped to reduce the workload. This is when production began in full swing. I managed to complete 49 background paintings in just 5 days! After that, it was time to animate.
Using the same spreadsheet, I created a separate section just for animation. My process for completing animation isn’t very typical, especially if I was working with a team of animators. I did the rough animation, clean animation, and colouring consecutively, then repeated the process for each scene. For most scenes, I skipped straight to clean animation to save time. Once I finished a shot, I added it to a master editing project. This part took the longest and required the most effort, but it was incredibly satisfying to watch my spreadsheet go from red “unfinished” scenes to green “completed” ones.
Three weeks later, I was finally at the homestretch. I spent the last few days fixing small mistakes and inconsistencies I caught along the way. Lastly, I added the lyrics and the effects to give it that nostalgic style. The journey was undoubtedly long and intense, but now that it’s all over, I find that I feel a lot stronger and faster in my ability to animate!
