J. Cole - Two Six — Nik Arthur

Title animation for J. Cole’s music video ‘Two Six’, using a chemical reaction with steel wool. Several time-lapses of this reaction were composited together to create the dynamic sequence.

Animation by Nik Arthur
Animation Assistance from Kayli Koonar
Type Design by Anna Chandler
Music Video Directed by Simon Chasalow

Simon Chasalow and his production team reached out for a title sequence for the new J. Cole “Two Six” video. Once we had landed on a concept, I entered material testing to see if the steel wool chemical reaction could work in a dynamic-enough way.

Evidently, while the reaction works well, the forms of the numbers left something to be desired. Anna took up the design of the lockup while I tried material tests, so the next stage was forming the number into the Anna’s much improved lockup.

I was not very good at this, but Kayli had a way with the wool and was able to replicate Anna’s forms very well. We shot 2-3 identical time-lapses, along with supplementary animation to fill the shot.

Anna’s type design

Kayli’s steel-wool-trace

Ignition

The reaction happening at 5x speed

To finish off the animation, I composited several pieces together, including a background plate, some frame-by-frame animated elements, and the retimed wordmark.

Watch the final video below.

Index

Nik Arthur (he/him) is a Canadian experimental animator and filmmaker, interacting with organic matter, objects, and physical materials.

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