12-12-2010
This is the final product of a motion graphics/typography assignment that required us to choose a book (that had not yet been translated to film) and create a main title sequence for it. There are 411 total layers in the video and each one was vectored in Illustrator and detailed in Photoshop. Animation was done in After Effects.
The first week of this project was spent brain storming and story-boarding. It was very important to me that the video strictly follow the storyboard and that everything was thoroughly thought out before being executed. The next three weeks of the project would consume my life as I wanted to make sure every single detail was perfect. I usually spent a handful of hours creating the elements of a scene, then twice that many animating it. Often times I would spend hours on a section of the video only to go back and start it from scratch because it didn't look the way I had planned. I can say without a doubt that I was more motivated on this project than any before it and I spent over 100 total hours creating it.
Finding music for the video became an interesting ordeal. For most videos like this I would choose the music before animating it so that the animation would match perfectly with the sound. For this project I chose to animate the video first, then find music. Though this seems to be the "wrong" way to go about it, I wanted the video to look exactly as I had planned and limiting myself to a specific song would have forced me to make visual sacrifices throughout the video. It turned out to be very difficult to find music that matched the flow of the video and I spent two solid days looking for the right song. I even tried splicing different songs together, but I eventually found the perfect match in a score by Thomas Newman. The mood of the song was right, and even the scene with the dolphins (one of the hardest sections to find music for, and what the search for music ultimately ended up centering around) synced up perfectly with the pacing of the music.
I am in the thick of final projects right now, but in a week or two I will post process sketches and stills from the creation process of the video. Also, please click on the "vimeo" button in the bottom right corner of the video to watch it in HD (that way you can fully appreciate all the details I spent oh-so-many hours working on).