A Curated Playlist
celebrating Kanye West's contribution to music, fashion, and art.
Looking for an excuse to collaborate with long time friend and uber talented illustrator Anu Chouhan, These Beats are Dope is an interactive playlist celebrating Kanye West's contribution to music, fashion, and art. A combination of Spine and the web APIs from Spotify and Youtube, the project launched with a feature on One Page Love, an honorable mention from Awwwwards, and much love from the music community.
A Glimpse into Implementation
With 7 variations of Kanye depicted throughout his discography, the layered illustrations were imported into Spine, where they were rigged and then keyframed. Animations were created from the assets, referenced later from a JSON playlist. The bopping was created with varying speeds to match music tempo, with breathing added for long pauses, and randomised blinking for a more life-like effect.
Tracking beats was a combination of manual effort and automatic interpolation. Creating a beat tracker with the Youtube API and Firebase, each time the spacebar was clicked. a keyframe referencing a specific timestamp would be recorded in the database. With a start time and end time indicating specific intervals of music, we only needed the BPM to determine exactly when Kanye would bop his head.
