The look and feel of this project are meant to be a hand-painted animation in a style of something you would have seen on Sesame Street in the late ’70s or early ’80s. The background was created in Adobe Photoshop by stacking layers of abstract paint splatters and brush strokes.

The background was then imported into After Effects and given a bit of motion and a variety of layer treatments were used to add texture and to make the layers semi-transparent.

The business of the background did not lend itself to the paint-on technique used for the featured image of each verse of the hymn, so a darker paint splatter layer was painted on at 5 frames per second to keep with the style of animation of the period we meant to copy.

The featured images for each verse were drawn in Photoshop using a stylized brush in a hand-painted style. Each brush stroke was an independent layer so when the image file was imported into After Effects as a composition, the individual layers could be “painted on”, revealing the final image by the close of the verse.

The verse’s featured image and the text were also given a slight wiggle using a displacement map in order to give the impression of a stop motion animation.