Project Overview
This is a 40 second CGI product film for the teenage engineering OP-XY, built around one idea: the device on screen is actually playing the music you hear.
There are plenty of beautiful renders of this synth online. I wanted to add a reason to keep watching. Every key press in the film lands on a real hit in the soundtrack, so the animation is the performance itself, not decoration on top of it.
Disclaimer: This is a personal spec project. It was not commissioned or endorsed by teenage engineering, and it was not produced for them. OP-XY and all related names and designs are trademarks of teenage engineering. The soundtrack is built from demo tracks published on the official OP-XY website and is used here for non-commercial portfolio purposes only.
Software
Blender
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
Substance Painter
The hardest part of this project was the very first step. Before I could animate anything I needed a soundtrack, and I wanted it to come from the product itself. I took two demo tracks from the official OP-XY page and edited them into a single piece.
The first track opens the film. It’s noisy and textural, and it sits under the intro, where the device assembles itself piece by piece out of the dark. Then the second track takes over with a steady groove and a heavy bass line, and that’s where the product starts to perform. From that point on, the key animation and most of the camera moves are driven by it.
From Audio to Animation
The main challenge was animating the keys without MIDI or stems. I only had the finished tracks, so I had to work backwards from the audio to build a timing reference. I used AI to help analyse the track and create reference videos showing separate curves for the kick, snare and hi-hat, with hits marked on a 30 fps timeline. I then mapped those hits to keys on the OP-XY layout and followed the same process for the bass and melody.
This took several iterations. I checked each version against the music and refined the timing and assignments until I had a reference I could use in Blender. That became the basis for the keyboard animation.
Modeling and Texturing
The OP-XY was modeled in Blender, with close attention to the details that sell the object up close: the soft rounded keys, the knurled metal knobs, the speaker grille and the edges of the body. The camera spends a lot of time just inches from the surface, so the geometry had to hold up in macro shots and under strong rim light.
Texturing was done in Substance Painter, keeping the materials as restrained as the real product: matte keys, metal knobs and fine surface variation that only shows when the light catches it. The key icons, markings and screen graphics were rebuilt as vectors in Illustrator so they stay sharp at any distance.
Motion and Camera
All animation was done in Blender. The intro builds the device from its parts, with keys and knobs flying into place over the first track. Once the groove kicks in, the camera follows the music. Moves push into the bass hits, macro shots travel along the rows of keys as they’re played, and wider shots let the whole device breathe between phrases.
Final compositing and color were completed in After Effects.
Results
The result is a short product film where motion, sound and render quality all point in the same direction. The keyboard performance is what sets it apart from other OP-XY visuals. Once you notice that the keys match the music, you start watching differently.
It also left me with a workflow I can reuse. Pulling timing data out of finished audio with AI works for any product with buttons, lights or moving parts that need to react to sound, from music hardware to consumer electronics to a brand’s campaign track.
Copyright ©
All original artwork published by Enrique Ramos Boquera (circlenline) is licensed under “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International”.
You must attribute the work to Enrique Ramos Boquera (circlenline) as the original author. Licensees may not use the work for commercial purposes unless they get permission.
Online presence
Unless otherwise specified or implied by the client, content (image, video or text) showing off any stage of a project may be featured on this website, social media or used in a portfolio/reel.