In 2012, I designed a production of Sylvia at Auburn University. The design included scenery, lighting, and projections. The visuals were all inspired by cover art from The New Yorker. You can read about that here.

The projected media had an illustrative quality to it that mimicked the cover art. We took this a little step further, and animated the transitions between scenes. Every scene included an elaborate sequence wherein the art in the background was drawn as if by a combination of camera pans and hand-drawn strokes by an invisible illustrator.

I posted a little video of one of these on social media a few days ago. The process of making this kind of media can be a little slow, but it does not require anything high-end. Programs like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker can create this kind of animation.

I made a how-to video for this process. I made a variation on the original media as a demonstration. I am including the components of that as a gallery, down at the end of this post. The stills were all made in Photoshop using the layers functon. Just keep duplicating the current layer. Color it some more, save it, do it again.