Self Portrait
IDEA
A glimpse at my ridiculously innocent childhood wishes that still remain with me today!
Becoming a dinosaur, befriending an alien, swimming with sharks, they’re all really cool things okay
RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
Since the theme was self portrait, it had to be something that was about us and I wanted to do something fun and simple. I was daydreaming when I suddenly thought of my childhood dreams and decided hey why not! They’re funny and probably a good base to make a motion graphic out of.
By watching countless of motion graphics (and related) videos, I started to get some inspiration and an inkling of how the visuals will look like. I’m extremely enamoured by SIAMES’ music video for ‘Wolf’. It uses shapes and silhouettes beautifully and most of their transitions are actually simple zooming into characters’ eyes and that was simple enough for me to execute.
Screenshots from ‘Wolf’ by SIAMES
I started planning and sketching out some storyboards of what compositions and assets I needed.
Following the storyboards, I started working on the actual assets on Photoshop, man there were so many layers. So Many.
Even the layers have more layers.
Eventually, I’m done and imported everything onto After Effects to start animating everything. It was an experience, fun though. Extremely tedious. I had to go into each ‘scene’ composition and then into each part followed by that part’s part, it goes on and on. I had already started on animating part by part manually when i found out about the puppet tool, and in order not to confuse myself any further I continued manually animating. I’ll definitely try puppet tool next time, looks really effective. I kept realising I needed to redo assets and even make entirely new assets, so that was a challenge. I also combined 2 separate music tracks to create a fitting melody for this motion graphic animation. After all that, I went to Premiere Pro to do some minor adjustments and it’s done!
Overall I honestly really enjoyed animating with After Effects and might actually try to practice and learn more about it on my own time. It was tough to grasp at first but it was a fun experience! Could have planned my ideas better and also my time better for a more satisfying end result, but all in all I’m sort of content with what I have done! It’s been a very productive 13 weeks!