Final project for the School of Motion course Explainer Camp, taught by instructors Jake Bartlett and Coralie Legrand.

 

We had to make a short animation from one of three fictional client briefs, and I selected this fundraiser for a fictional NGO called Veruna. The script and voiceover were supplied by the course, while we had to develop a visual treatment that brought it to life, then design it and animate it. This was all done in After Effects, with some bits in Photoshop and Illustrator and Animate.

 

I organized the design and composition around a circle, and carried that forward from shot to shot. It ended up being, essentially, one continuous shot from beginning to end, which meant the elements had to morph from one sequence to the next. The overall effect seems simple, but it required a lot of story editing and animation grunt work to tie everything together. Along the way, I managed to squeeze in a few visual metaphors like a light at the end of a tunnel, and a proverbial drop in the bucket.

 

One of my other concepts for this brief would have had more character animation, which I thought would be more difficult than this (“This is going to be too simple!”), but these morphs were more labour-intensive than I realized. It took several passes and different methods before I figured out how to do those morphs in a satisfactory way. As I learned, hand-animating a complex morph isn’t exactly the most efficient way of doing it. But that’s what we’re in a course for: trying things, learning from failure, getting feedback, trying again.

 

It was quite a journey over the past three months, going from initial pitch concepts and storyboards, to animatics, to full animation. But this is the foundational workflow I need to master for the future, and this course was rigorous practice for that workflow. Looking forward to building on this foundation in the future.

 

Music: “What We Care About” by Tiny Music / Premium Beat
Sound Effects: Adobe Audition Sound Library