Etsy - A Hand Crafted Theme

The Creative Brief

I was approached by Nevernot Productions and Sylvain to score an animated video highlighting some of the premier creators that exist on Etsy for their campaign, Special Starts on Etsy. The goal for this project was to make something that felt as vibrant and as alive as the products and people that make up the Etsy marketplace. They wanted something that was fun and bouncy and would play well with the motion design language.

Developing the Concept

Because of the tight deadline on this project, I started working and developing musical ideas before seeing any motion at all. My goal was to find a way to translate the Etsy brand into something that was fun, had a catchy beat and would give the motion designers interesting moments to animate to. I sent over a bunch of demo tracks and it was obvious from the response that there was a clear winner with a track titled “Elasticubes”. They liked that the track had a good bounce, that it was playful and that it kept a strong forward momentum throughout.

Iterating to Picture

Once we locked in the right track, there was a ton of revision to be done as the animation evolved and changed over the course of the editing process. Each new revision required retiming and there was a lot of attention paid to getting the transitional moments between each scene correct. Early feedback that I got was that the track had the right energy, but it felt like there wasn’t enough variation or evolution in the instrumentation. Over the course of many revision I slowly added woodwind parts, acoustic piano and live drum fills to balance the harder hitting 808 drums and synth bass. The end result was a nice hybrid of something that had the rhythm and motion of a dance track with the added emotional presence of acoustic instruments.

Takeaways

I’ve been a huge fan of Etsy for a long time, I think there are some truly amazing creators on there even as the volume of content has made searching for things challenging in recent years. This project offered me a chance to imagine for myself what is the value of something that is refined carefully through skill and effort. I’m inspired by people who truly everything they have into their work and I wanted the theme for this project to reflect the joy of creativity; of making something out of nothing.