Final project for the Domestika course “Microanimations in 2D in After Effects” taught by Modik Studio. We had to create a series of micro-animations featuring related four characters. The course brief was about circus characters such as a strongman, an acrobat, a contortionist, and so on. But I’d recently read Full Circle by Alex Ross, and also the Jonathan Hickman run of Fantastic Four. Since those four characters resembled the archetypes in the circus theme, I thought they would be a great fit for the project.

 

I didn’t draw the Fantastic Four much in my teen years, so I had to do some exploration to figure out my interpretation for the characters. I wanted them to be defined by geometric shapes. One of the inspirations were the end credits of the Pixar film The Incredibles, which uses a stylized and angular character style. Some of that inspiration can be seen in the initial design for Invisible Woman, but I didn’t stick too closely to that style, and ended up make the characters a bit softer and less angular. However, I tried to give each character their own shape language and silhouette.