Livestream Intro
for 88 Sessions
Project Type: Motion Design
Role: Sole Creative
Timeline: Oct 2025 - Dec 2025
Client: WRAS 88.5FM Album 88
88 Sessions is the live music division of WRAS 88.5FM Album 88, Georgia State University’s student run radio station. The organization hosts frequent concerts that are free to students and feature local Atlanta musicians. These concerts are also live streamed on the Album 88 YouTube channel.
Challenge
During the livestreams, there is typically a wait period between the stream starting and the beginning of the performance while audio, lights, and video finish being set up. In the past, the livestream displayed a static logo during this wait period. As a more exciting, engaging, and branded alternative, I created a loopable intro animation to play during the livestream opening period.
before this project, no intro graphics
Understanding 88 Sessions
I was already very familiar with 88 Sessions, as I had been a part of Album 88’s DJ staff for two years prior to this project. Having been to several of their concerts, I had firsthand experience for the atmosphere of 88 Sessions. The concerts are lively but tight-knit, doubling as a hangout for Album 88 DJs and their friends. there’s a strong sense of community and identity being brought together through a love of local music, and pride in seeing a concert run entirely by student volunteers.
Concept Development
Leading with the atmosphere of 88 Sessions, I wanted to, without dialogue, make an animation that told a story of anticipating and enjoying a concert. Following city-dwelling characters through their daily journey and ending at a concert would build a sense of anticipation for the actual concert ahead after the animation.
Storyboarding
Each scene featured a fly on the wall third person perspective observing cat characters through their day leading up to the concert. I decided to use cats rather than humans both for stylistic fun, and so that anyone could better project themselves onto the characters without needing to align with their appearance.
A cat listens to music on a train. Cats pass an 88 Sessions concert poster on the street. Student cats set up for the concert. Musician cats perform the concert as the bustling crowd is revealed to be enjoying both the show and their community together. Finally, the camera follows sound waves into a single cat’s ear, plunging into darkness where the 88 Sessions logo is revealed.
Style Influences
I knew immediately that the animation style should be grungy in some way, emphasizing the DIY underground nature of both 88 Sessions and the artists that perform for it. Still, the tone felt ultimately earnest and lighthearted. I didn’t want a style that felt too serious for the concept. I found middle ground with heavy inspiration from old Cartoon Network bumpers in which 2D animated characters were composited into realistic environments, blending grunge and whimsy.
Another discovery in my researching animation styles was squigglevision, in which slightly different drawings of the same character are looped to create a vibrating effect. I was enamored with the technique and imagined that it would be a good way to make my frame by frame animation more engaging and emphasize the DIY attitude of the animation.
Style Frames
I put my vision for the animation to the test with style frames. I quickly found that placing each character on a textured paper cutout provided necessary extra contrast with the realistic environments. I knew that this addition would make the frame by frame animation more complicated, but the improved contrast would undoubtedly be worth it.
camera setup view for the intro's stage scene
Animating
Each character was animated first in Photoshop to create the squigglevision effect. For characters with multiple poses, I created duplicate files for each pose so that I could control switching between them in After Effects. I composited each scene in After Effects’s 3D space, layering 2D assets to create a parallax effect. Using the 3D space camera, each scene utilized focal length depth of field. These effects are most visible in the transition away from the performing cat band that reveals the lively crowd. This scene, and the ending that follows it, changed from the initial storyboard to prioritize showcasing the parallax environment over using excessive pan and zoom transitions.
Lighting and 3D
Tying together the appearance of a 3D photorealistic space, I utilized lighting in each scene. From the soft glow of a street lamp to the coordination of stage spotlights, each scene is further bought to life by 3D space lights that interact with characters and their environments. I was so pleased with the effect of adding lights that I changed the ending logo reveal to use them rather than having the logo itself glow.
Audio Mixing
I knew that all my efforts to make the environments of the animation feel dynamic and lived-in would be in vein if there wasn’t thoughtfully placed audio to match them. My goal was ultimately to recreate what you might hear if you closed your eyes and just listened in one of these environments, including little details like the hum of a lamp or paper creasing in the wind. For some sounds, like the train or the background noise of the band warming up, I went out in the world to record them myself. Each scene ended up with several layers of audio clips carefully mixed to prioritize the most important sounds.