Two weeks ago I was alone on the couch watching Loki on Disney+ and made a joke out loud to myself about Loki’s low-key lofi beats to study time crimes to. I thought it was silly, so I figured I’d draw it out and write a piece about what he listened to while studying time crimes. After a few hours of drawing Loki, I thought, “well, I don’t know how to animate stuff, but I bet I can figure it out.”
I downloaded the Adobe After Effects trial, watched a few quick YouTube tutorials, and set off making a few more pieces of art for this joke that probably would have withered on the mental vine had I not felt compelled to make it come to life. It took me the entire week to get it to this point (turns out, learning animation when you have never done it before is harder than it looks), and I know it took a week because I had rush to finish before my trial expired.
I planned to grab a bunch of royalty-free music from YouTube, toss it on the video, and call it a day, but then my cousin Charles, who is professional producer who makes beats for a living, offered to make some custom Avengers/Loki-inspired beats for it. Now I have a video that’s far better than it has any right to be.
Check out Coastal on Spotify.
It’s funny how creativity works. A silly idea that would most likely have been forgotten had I been distracted, or doing something else, blossomed into a 23-minute homage to Loki and lofi girl. I think that’s pretty nifty.
Alex Sargeant is a writer, artist, and creator of videos at The Layman. If you like what you’ve read, please consider subscribing to get more writings sent to your inbox every Thursday.
This is a very satisfying Venn diagram overlap of my interests.
You had me a Loki Lofi.