Angela’s Arms
Angela’s Arms: A Visual Symphony in Ink and Motion.
In 2023, I was commissioned to create the music video for Angela’s Arms, a haunting and personal track by indie band Ria Plays, featured on their EP Cherry Red Hearts. Written by lead singer Ria Parfitt, the song unfolds as an intimate reflection on grief, love, and transformation, an emotional landscape I sought to honour and amplify through visual storytelling.
Challenges & Objectives
/ Project Overview
Rather than opting for traditional animation or live action, I chose to work with stop-motion using ink dropped in liquid, an unusual medium that allowed for a fluid, dreamlike quality. This technique became the soul of the video: unpredictable, organic, and emotionally resonant. Hundreds of high-resolution stills were captured in sequence, each frame the result of carefully controlled chaos, echoing the song’s themes of dissolution and reformation.
/ Challenges
The process began with extensive conceptual development, storyboarding the emotional arc in three acts, aligning each visual movement with the song’s structure. Sketches, colour studies, and narrative mapping formed the foundation of what would become a visual miniature, a short film in its own right.
/ Objectives
The video opens on dark, atmospheric imagery: Icelandic-inspired beaches under shifting skies, evoking isolation and raw memory. From there, the visuals evolve into a psychedelic hallucination, bursts of ink and colour swirling like emotion uncontained. The final act delivers the arrival of a figure, a symbolic emergence from the storm. The entire journey becomes a meditation on identity, connection, and release.
/ Final Outcome
Angela’s Arms is not just a music video, it’s a cinematic expression of sound through motion. My role as director, animator, and visual storyteller involved guiding every stage of production, from early creative development through technical delivery. It was a project grounded in collaboration, but fuelled by a singular commitment to elevate the music’s emotional weight through a unique visual form.
This commission stands as an example of how animation can expand the narrative capacity of music, how moving images, when crafted with intention, becomes an extension of voice.