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Here’s a thread about making Polished. It was my first time doing a film and animation project 
The concept was @skofeemusic's from the beginning. Originally, Anna proposed walking in place on a treadmill while changing her clothes. That idea evolved after a bunch of tests in my apartment using boxes as a stand-in (sorry Anna).
We wanted to convey the idea that she was stuck in place, drowning in her subconscious and in self-doubt, and then gradually, pulling herself out of it.
So in the early shots, Anna isn’t moving other than on a treadmill that takes her nowhere. But as the song progresses, Anna moves beyond the treadmill though confined interior spaces that gradually open up to the outdoors. This was the storyboard:
In the second chorus, she passes through a door frame. In the bridge, down a narrow hallway that releases into the wide and open living room. And in the last chorus, we cut to the exterior shot. Showing this progression gradually was important to me.
Throughout the vid we also progress from a tight focus on Anna’s face, to a wider shot of her torso, to a very wide shot that rotates 360° around her body. The idea was to reinforce that progression.
The second verse was special because we used a tracking shot. While Anna moves through the space, her face stays centered and steady. Much like the treadmill shots, we reinforce this idea of being stuck in place by combining moving and stationary shots together.
In the final shot we used a really long extension cord to bring the treadmill outside. We shot off confetti cannons to have some real-world interplay with the colorful sketches that would be added later 
The sketches throughout represent a window into Anna’s subconscious. Sometimes, they are quite literal. At other times they represent the abstract thoughts that bubble up inside of all of us.
In the second chorus I put the sketches right on top of Anna's face to reinforce her subconscious taking over.
To draw, I opened an edit of the footage in Photoshop and then drew on top of each frame with a Wacom. In the end there were about 3000 sketches. I exported them separately with an alpha channel to the final edit in FCP and then layered added blur to create an ethereal effect.
I also wrote a few custom Photoshop actions to speed up the drawing process and automatically find and mask off Anna so that sketches wouldn't cover her face.
Finally, everything was shot LOG and so coloring it correctly proved to be one of the most difficult parts of the process. I used FCP for the final coloring. Happy with the tones we got in the end that were inspired by Anna's outfits.
There’s a lot more that happened in the making this video, but leaving it at that for now. Thanks for reading and watch the full video here:
