The purpose of a lyric video is to display a song's words on-screen, so that people can sing along or learn them. These were originally fan uploads, and were often simple videos displaying text on a black screen (reminiscent of karaoke). But artists have in recent years been using them as a second avenue of creative expression alongside the main music video, often released simultaneously.
The video was made with a few different components
The first is a fixed shot of a porcelain cat rotating on a record player. This shot was chosen to reference the main video, which features these cats as well.
Bubbles appear from the record player and rise up to the top of the screen. These are simple 2D circles with randomized colours and oscillating radii which are generated in javacode (specifically Processing). Their sizes vary randomly and also with their starting position, to give an impression of depth. The idea was to give a sense of the music floating up and off the record, which is congruent with the song's dreamy feel.
The text appears and moves similarly to the bubbles, positioned randomly, word by word and rising up. I intended this to feel different to traditional lyric videos, which tend to feature static text appearing on the screen line by line. And the fact that the words are positioned randomly and escape quickly gives the viewer a sense of tension and madness which is one of the song’s themes.
Pixel Sorting
Finally, the song features some crazier moments which were jarring with the relatively calm motion on-screen, so I added a glitchy pixel sorting effect which varies with the beat and kicks in during moments of heightened tension. This technique is used to a lesser extent in the main video for the song as well, a few clips from which I added during these moments for extra effect, as an additional tie-in to the other video.
This pixel sorting technique could have its own post, but suffice to say I created a smoother effect than is generally achieved by pixel sorting, by imposing a relative termination criterion to the sort windows, rather than the absolute window which most others seem to. You can see the benefits of this adjusted technique in the way that the text remains mostly legible even when the pixel sorting gets very extreme.
And here's the main video for reference/comparison:
