Welcome back to Project Spotlights! Today, I want to share a project that marks a fascinating evolution in my creative workflow
the animated music video for the artist Jeffrey Shark, “You Can Play It Again.”
This project wasn’t just an incredible opportunity to illustrate a cheerful children’s song; it also became the perfect testing ground for integrating AI-generated animation into my production pipeline.
The Challenge: A Hybrid Process
From the beginning, the goal was clear: create a visually vibrant video, full of life, to match the energy of Jeffrey Shark’s music.
My design and setup process remained true to my established style—character design, background illustration, and overall art direction. However, for the animation phase, we decided to explore a hybrid path.
Instead of manually animating every frame (an incredibly time-consuming process), I used AI tools to generate a significant portion of the motion.
The Reality of Working with AI
If I learned one thing from this project, it’s that AI is not a “magic button” that solves everything. It is an incredibly powerful tool, but it requires an experienced hand to guide it.
The clips generated by the AI didn’t always come out perfectly. In fact, I had to manually rework and refine almost every single generated clip. This is where post-production becomes more crucial than ever.
All the raw material was brought into After Effects, where I handled the final composition, color correction, timing adjustments, and cleanup of any artifacts or errors the AI had introduced. It was a meticulous process of curation and polish, where human artistic vision guides and corrects the tool’s raw output.
The Result: “You Can Play It Again”
The final result is a video that, in my opinion, achieves a very high visual quality, and it was completed in a fraction of the time that traditional animation would have required.
I am very proud of how my core design aesthetic successfully merged with the fluidity of AI-assisted animation.
You can watch the full video here:
Conclusion: AI as a Creative Amplifier
This project is a perfect example of how Artificial Intelligence, far from replacing the artist, becomes a creative amplifier.
It allows us to experiment, iterate faster, and reach production levels that were previously difficult to achieve solo. The key is to see AI for what it is: one more powerful tool in our creative arsenal.
For me, the future of animation looks like this: a hybrid collaboration between human vision and technological power.