Concept board: a dense field of flat shapes, a lime arc, deep purple triangles, a pink star, a lilac flower and a pink spiral on white

Shape
Dance Party

Motion graphics coursework, animated to music

A twenty-two second animation built entirely from flat geometric shapes and cut to a track. No characters, no type, no story. Just shapes arriving on the beat.

Type

Coursework, motion graphics

Service

Motion design and animation

Year

2025

Designer

Katrina Dodds

Process

Shapes on
the beat.

The assignment was to animate to a track, which means the track picks the structure before anything gets drawn. I used the instrumental of Crazy by LE SSERAFIM. It has a hard repetitive beat and obvious section changes, so the cut points were already there to find. Everything on screen is a flat vector shape: circles, triangles, stars, hexagons, petals and a few squiggle-filled blobs. Nothing represents anything. The only job a shape has is to arrive at the right moment.

Working from a fixed vocabulary is what made twenty-two seconds manageable. I settled it in a set of concept boards first: five colors and roughly a dozen shape types, reused at different scales and rotations. That way every cut still belongs to the same piece even when the composition changes completely, and the busiest arrangement and the emptiest one come out of exactly the same parts.

The film

Twenty-two seconds,
start to finish.

The whole piece. Worth playing with sound on, since the timing is the design and it only makes sense against the track.

Credits

Animation by Katrina Dodds. Scored to the instrumental of Crazy by LE SSERAFIM, used for a class assignment. 1920 by 1080, roughly twenty-two seconds.

Concept boards

Same parts,
different rooms.

Boards made while planning the piece, not frames from it. Each one tests a different arrangement of the same shape set, working out how the thing should feel before any of it moved.

Concept board: three deep purple circles filled with pink squiggle patterns, descending in size across a white field
Concept board: a lime field with two deep purple squiggle-patterned circles cropped into opposite corners and a white asterisk at centre
Concept board: a pink star, magenta triangles, a large lime circle, a deep purple hexagon and a lilac quadrilateral arranged across white

Composition

Density was the variable I was testing. Some boards pack twenty shapes into the frame, others sit on four large ones and a lot of empty white. Establishing that range on paper is what gave the animation somewhere to move between, without changing a single color.

Shape vocabulary

A dozen parts,
reused.

Hexagons, ellipses, triangles, petals, stars, slabs and squiggle-filled circles. That is the entire cast.

The boards fixed that vocabulary before the animation started, and everything in the finished piece is built from it, scaled and rotated rather than redrawn. Limiting the parts early was the fastest way to keep twenty-two seconds of fast cutting coherent.

Concept board: a deep purple hexagon, lime ellipse, magenta triangles and pale lilac shapes scattered across a white field

Color palette

Five colors,
one ground.

Deep purple and magenta carry the hard contrast, lime supplies the energy, and the two pale tints keep the crowded frames from collapsing into noise. Everything sits on white.

01

Deep Purple

HEX
#211F5E
RGB
33, 31, 94
CMYK
65, 67, 0, 63
02

Magenta

HEX
#E93386
RGB
233, 51, 134
CMYK
0, 78, 42, 9
03

Lime

HEX
#D9E020
RGB
217, 224, 32
CMYK
3, 0, 86, 12
04

Blossom

HEX
#EFA5CA
RGB
239, 165, 202
CMYK
0, 31, 15, 6
05

Lilac

HEX
#D9CFE8
RGB
217, 207, 232
CMYK
6, 11, 0, 9
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