For a new collaboration with TikTok, we asked 12 creatives to interpret 12 emotions

Also important to note is the use of sound and music on TikTok. Many a song has found success simply because it’s been attached to a trend, the example you’re probably most familiar with being Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road. Right now, a scroll on the app will be soundtracked by Megan Thee Stallion’s Savage, Drake’s Tootsie Slide, Roses (Imanbek Remix) by Saint Jhn or Human by Christina Perri (among many, many others). The punchline of a joke or the reveal of a twist is always intertwined with the video’s audio – TikTok would be a confusing and incredibly abstract place without sound.

All of these unique aspects of the platform sprang immediately to mind when TikTok got in touch with the idea for us at It’s Nice That to commission a bunch of our favourite creatives to produce their very own TikToks. The series, which launches today, is called Creative Canvas and will see 12 creatives taking over the “TopView” slot on the app. It’s the first thing users see upon opening the app, filling 100 per cent of their screen, presenting an amazing opportunity to put original and imaginative creative work in front of the eyes of millions who may not have seen it otherwise.

We started by thinking about creativity’s role within the app, where ideas generally rank above aesthetics. The potential for experimentation is huge, providing something of a playground for anyone with a penchant for artistry and self-expression, let alone when in the hands of a creative professional. What could a set designer with years of experience in the fashion industry do on the app? How might a stop-motion animator approach creating work for it? It was these notions of play, individuality, breadth of discipline, and flair that eventually made it into the project concept.

Lucas is best known for his anthropomorphised kinetic sculptures and seamless animations featuring two googly eyes. The former are beautifully simple, made with whatever Lucas has lying around, be it a ping-pong ball and a hoover or a load of paper plates. His digital works, on the other hand, are satisfyingly slick, perfectly looping clips that are as mesmerising as they are absorbing. Whether made on a computer or IRL, though, all his creations explore the transformative effect that eyes can have, injecting emotion into a piece of work unlike anything else. It’s for this reason that Lucas felt like the perfect man to take on this brief.

To begin the project with enthusiasm, we asked Lucas to interpret the word “excitement”. With the freedom to do this as he pleased, Lucas’ first thought “was to make an endless looping animation with the TikTok logo,” he says. The brief appealed to the Italian animator and director, who is particularly drawn to those projects in which “different artists are involved and asked to interpret something within similar parameters”.

True to form, what Lucas has created in response to this brief is congenial, smart and technically adept. Throughout the loop, we see a 3D, bountiful version of the TikTok quaver as it hooks itself around a peg, swings on it and releases itself back into the air, inflating with varying degrees of fervour every time it does so. There’s a constrained recklessness within the clip, as the logo appears to spiral out of control, before being pulled back down again by gravity. It feels joyous and energised, as if the logo itself is exhilarated, experiencing the adrenaline rush of each rotation. The absorbing interaction is then set against a background of green, red and beige.

Lucas’ TikTok, as all the upcoming commissions will, bops along to audio created by London-based sound design studio Sounds Like These. With the understanding that sound is such an instrumental (pardon the pun) part of the app, it made sense that each creative should respond to the same track, interpreting it in a different way – in a process akin to how users of TikTok create videos themselves. “Obviously we love making sound and audio is such a prominent part of the TikTok experience, so it was great to really dive headfirst into the project,” Sounds Like These tells us. “We loved the idea of providing a musical starting point for other artists to respond to, rather than being an afterthought to the creative process, which is so often the case with sound.”

While Sounds Like These was excited to be providing a springboard for all other creatives to work from, creating audio for visuals that do not yet exist and that will embody so many different emotions was no mean feat. The brief was to make something catchy, energetic and smooth but which wasn’t overtly “pop”; it had to be neutral enough to appeal to a broad demographic. “We knew each visual artist would approach the brief in their own way, so our track needed to be distinctive yet recognisable enough to function as the common thread tying them all together as part of the same campaign,” Sounds Like These adds. The studio always aims to write music that its team would personally like to listen to, and so with all this in mind “it was a nice opportunity to take inspiration from music that inspires us and try to create something that visual artists in our community would respond to.”