Wishing
Sight of Sound, Fall 2026, KatieLee
Since learning about this project in junior year, I had been thinking about what song or music I could pick to animate to. But once the project was announced, I almost immediately knew what piece of music I wanted to choose. I honestly didn’t think any song would fit better than Wishing by John Frusciante. As a very avid fan of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I have also listened to John’s rock albums and have loved his experimentation with his own music.
For this project, I joined with Niki to create our animation and deliverables, which was super exciting. We’ve collaborated in a multitude of other classes and projects and work well together, so it was exciting to work with her on this animation.
Wishing has this pretty, ethereal quality to it that stands out and creates vivid imagery that fits perfectly along with the instrumental parts of the music. The texture from that piano in between verses is really what sets it apart from any other song or music I thought of, even though I created quite a list of songs I had in mind for this project. Luckily, Niki was very on board with Wishing, and we had similar ideas going into discussing the animation and deliverables, thinking about water drops, wind chimes, stars, and bunnies to represent wishes and wishing. It was, honestly, a little bit of a dream come true to be able to work on this project with a song I really loved by one of my all-time favorite artists. Super excited! :)
We came together and discussed ideas for Wishing, and used the lyrics and the musical texture as inspiration. We decided that we wanted to combine our individual 16-second parts to create a longer story and seamless narrative, so we made sure to collaborate on our beginning and ending frames. We also thought animating by hand was the best way to approach this project and gave the best imperfection-is-perfect feel that was represented by Wishing and the album, The Will to Death. John Frusciante highlighted the important point that the perfection of The Will to Death comes from its raw takes and going-with-the-flow feel, and I wanted to bring that feeling to the animation by having the sketchy, pencil, hand-drawn animation, done in Procreate, instead of shapes or any other animation method.
Hand-drawing an animation was a very daunting task for both of us. I particularly struggled with the volume of the work and the fact that I hadn’t really animated before. I researched and found GIFs and videos online and drew them out so they would create a storyline at 16 frames per second. I loved Niki’s inspiration from the Japanese interpretation of the Mid-Autumn Festival, and so we created a story around a bunny and its wishing explorations. My animation features a bunny running through puddles, making a wish at a wishing well, and gazing at shooting stars, and it ends back at the moon to loop with Niki’s part.
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I was super excited to turn the animation into a risograph animation, even though I knew that was going to require a lot of extra effort and planning to make sure we had the materials and time to riso. It took a few tries to print out the right masters, which are what you use to scan to print each color out. Eventually, I printed the right masters for our three colors (kelly green, medium blue, and violet) and printed each color, one by one. I really enjoy the riso process of pressing buttons and watching my designs come to life, and I printed my animation fairly quickly with this process. Afterwards, I put my animation together in Adobe Photoshop and After Effects, and it was super rewarding to put Niki’s and my animations together with the music.
I took a very simple approach with the zine, posters, and postcards because I wanted to highlight specific frames and actions from my animation, such as the coin going into the wishing well, the ripples in puddles, and shooting stars. I combined multiple frames onto posters and postcards, and the end result was a cool collage of multiple frames.
I really enjoyed this project, and it was also really amazing to have this project exhibited in a gallery, which was the first time for our class. It was so awesome to see our animation on a big scale, and I really enjoyed working with the class to curate an exhibition and seeing the amazing animations my peers created.
