bed rot song
BLOG POST 4 (Originally posted on ashsuh.com) March 15 2026
About two and a half weeks ago, I was rotting away in my bed and when all of a sudden WABLAM a SPARK of inspiration struck. I had a visceral image of mushrooms growing from my body as I lay on my side, eyes locked in on an infinite scroll of doom. As mushrooms burst from my unblinking eyes, my cat Anita Tension saves the day just like in real life, pulling me out of my mycelial coffin to bring up an immediately pressing issue:
she needs attention.
Call that deus ex machANITA.
I leapt from my bed right on to my desk (as you can see in the music video, my desk is right next to my bed so it was not a very big leap at all) to hammer out some thumbnails for a quick short. I had some time off of work for spring break and the production seemed very manageable: just 9 shots, one 3D environment, and one 3D character with minimal design and animation. The most intensive part would be animating the mushrooms and Anita frame-by-frame, but that was the part that I was most excited about doing.
SKETCHBOOK
ANIMATIC
I challenged myself to make everything in Blender so instead of going from sketchbook thumbnail to photoshop storyboard to aftereffects animatic, I jumped straight into greasepencil to make the animatic with a rough demo of the song. The short is not long and the process was so quick that by the end of day, I had an animatic.
An easy start to animating with grease pencil:
When you boot up Blender, create a new “2D animation” file
This will set you up in grease pencil-optimised workspace with draw mode on by default, four different materials, two layers, and “auto key” turned on so you can go ahead and start animatin’ right off the bat.
BEDROOM PHOTOGRAMMETRY
I used Polycam, which I am a big polyfan of, to take a photogrammetry scan of my bedroom.
It was a very easy and fast process to upload images of my bedroom to polycam, download the model, and import it into Blender. I was on the fence about using this at first. It is a very personal space, and yet it is an atom slice of my life: a simulaCRUMB of my bedroom one morning of one day of one year of my life. On a technical vibe level, I like how the funky offset geometry provides a perfectly disorienting atmosphere.
CHECK OUT THE ORIGINAL BLOG POST ON MY WEBSITE TO PLAY AROUND WITH THE 3D MODEL OF MY BEDROOM
Don’t forget to hide all the stuff you want to hide and cover the windows before scanning your room and uploading it to the internet.
ANIMATION PRODUCTION
The character on the bed is made up of:
- Quilted blanket mesh using this tutorial with the room mesh and some simple shapes set as collision objects for the blanket to fall on. Once it fell how I liked, I used the sculpt tool to adjust a bit more to my liking.
- Arm made mostly with curves to tubes and everything remeshed in geometry nodes so all the finger tubes get combined into one mesh
- Eyes are made of simple planes with emission shader
- Head is a sphere with a volume shader set to black that acts as a light blocker
- Thumb is animated with shape keys linked in from a separate file where I also animated the screen
It took me a bit of time to settle into a good workflow for the mushrooms. Eventually I found out the best way was to focus on one mushroom at a time:
- set the 3D cursor where I wanted the mushroom to grow from
- set the drawing plane to “view”, duplicate the previous frame
- delete the grease pencil stroke that I want to replace, and draw the next frame
Of course, I fumbled a few times and had to really scrutinize every frame for disappearing mushrooms. Luckily, I found out that if you go into the “edit” mode, you can copy and paste grease pencil strokes from one frame to the next. So if I missed any mushrooms on one frame, I could quickly copy and paste the stroke to other frames.
I also added a “Noise” modifier to give the strokes a nice wiggly effect.
SONG PRODUCTION
The day after I made the animatic, I was petting Anita while she was eating and was KABLAM suddenly STRUCK with a bolt of lyrical inspiration. Anita does usually enjoy the songs I make up for her while she eats so I wrote up a short song to go along with the animation. Up until this point, I’ve only made animations for songs I’ve written already, making this the first song I’ve written specifically for an animation, and also the first song that I’ve produced myself instead of relying on the musical talents of my ex or anyone else.
I produced the song with Ableton Live Lite. It took me a few days and a lot of tutorials to figure out the software. But one afternoon it finally clicked and I broke into a nice flow state. I was hitting the hot keys and the years of music theory classes were flowing back to me. It feels good to be easing back into music again, albeit via digital instrument.
CONCLUSION
I studied double bass at a performing arts high school and was awarded scholarships to study it in college so for a majority of my life I was pretty convinced music was the only thing I could ever do because it was the only thing I was somewhat decent at. After college I burnt out pretty badly. It led me to pursue my interest in digital art, which led to a graphic design weekend bootcamp thing, which led to teaching myself aftereffects, which led to grad school for animation, which led to ‘bed rot song’.
I had really bad associations with music so I avoided it for a good long while. But I have to remember that it was a huge part of my life in the same way that animation is now, so denying that part of my art would be limiting myself in the same way that I was limiting myself when I only did music.
Thank you to my friends who helped me out with this song and showed great support throughout the process:
Connie Li
Margaret Sohn
and
Sarian Sankoh
Check out their work !!
