Showing how pop music is created, visually.

Each episode of The New York Times series Diary of a Song tells the story of the making of a commercially successful pop song.

Ed Sheeran’s ‘The Shape of You’ is reconstructed through motion design elements animated in time to music, combined with interviews shot against a studio white (or possibly green) screen. Together, they build a visual language, in real time, to tell the story of a creative process:

One step at a time, the visual elements are introduced and built, much like the track, until we are in their “world”:

The visual language is appropriately different in the episode ‘Where Are U Now’: Bieber, Diplo and Skrillex Make a Hit, to better reflect the nature of the sounds and the track:

It’s possible the interviews were actually shot against white / grey / black backgrounds respectively, as the graphics more often tend to take place around and over, rather than behind them: