A main goal of this week was to nail down the intro section of the project. My initial intention was to use a time-lapse screen recording of a digital illustration. While this is an idea I still want to experiment with in the future, it was not working for this project. It involved creating an Action in Photoshop that, once recorded, could be played on a transparent layer, giving the impression of a real-time drawing. After quite a bit of trial and error, I found this approach to have its limitations The drawing had to be very simplistic for one, and the final result did not have the smoothness I was looking for. Back to the drawing board.
I toyed with the idea of a type-centric intro à la Stranger Things. I found a very helpful tutorial video that walked through how to achieve the basic effect. I didn’t want to copy the style 100% and was more interested in the kinetic typography aspect. This approach involved creating masks for each letter so their positions could be manipulated individually. Switching the letters to 3D and adding a new camera allowed for the zoom effect which finally resolved as a zoomed out reveal of the text as the letters are settled into place. While a neat effect overall, I still wanted to capture the illustrative nature of this project in the intro. The search continued.
Eventually I came across this technique of animating multiline patterns. I decided to do not one but three fox illustrations. They needed to be vector, so for the first time in this project, I drew them in Illustrator. After importing the vector foxes into After effects, I used Create > Create Shapes from Vector Layer which results in an Outline layer which acts as a Matte once parented to the original layer.
vector foxes
The next step involved selecting each group of lines and creating Trim Paths. By setting ‘End’ keyframes to 0% and 100%, the lines in each drawing filled in a way that made them appear to drawn in real-time. This was the effect I was going for all along and while it may not be as natural as a real-time drawing, it was certainly smoother than anything I had done so far. Organizing the lines in sequence and staggering the keyframes added to the effect.
I really liked where this was going but the intro still seemed to be missing something. One of the main themes of this project, and a key part of the intro voice over, is that these fox stories come from all over the world. I felt the intro needed something to exhibit this global subject matter. What better than a map! Over the years I have collected a bunch of vector maps and this was the perfect time to use a simple world map as a background. I added a scrolling effect and had the opacity dip in and out so as not to take away from the fox line animation.
fox line animation on scrolling map
Finally I had an intro I was happy with. I think this fits the project and flows well into the first section. I considered breaking up the sections into 3 separate shorts, but to me, this intro brings a cohesiveness to the project. I felt that adding it to the beginning of the three videos separately would be to repetitive, and now that I had something that worked, I wanted to use it!
The next steps for the fox project will involve tightening the screws on a few sections. Audio and sound effects can definitely use some polishing and I’m looking forward to adding refining some of the animated gestures throughout.
The holidays are approaching and the deadline for this project will be here before I know. For now though, I’m happy with how things are shaping up.
‘Til next time,
AM