Jessamine is an experimental animated music video for Ghost Orchard. Using chlorophyl printing, hand-drawn and digitally assembled animation frames were printed on to beds of leaves.

Directed and Animated by Nik Arthur and Emi Takahashi

To start, we made a looping sprite animation of an abstraction of a bird flying. Emi did a big exploration of different glyphs we could use, and together we found an animation cycle. After, we took the birds and animated them into a starling murmuration, which we printed on to grape leaves.

This is called chlorophyll printing, where the sun bleaches the areas of the leaf left exposed. Each frame blends into the last. They’re layered, like the leaves.