Since my last post, the majority of my time on the fox project has been spent refining and making adjustments. Everything was in place, it was just a matter of making the piece tighter and more cohesive. No large scale reworking was needed, but there were a few sections that could use improvement.
First of these was in the Greece section. As mentioned in an earlier post, I created an expression in After Effects that allowed the fox and the dog to rotate with increasing speed in the “chase” segment. The problem was that watching the two characters begin to gather speed was not very visually interesting. I toyed with the idea of adding text to describe the action:
This looked clunky, however, and I felt that it conflicted with the voice-over. Rather than over-complicating the section with text, I decided that a straight ahead image of the fox and the dog’s faces would be better. This matched an image with the attributes described in the voice-over and broke up the rotating elements nicely. Fading in the faces and increasing the scale gave me the look I was going for.
Next up was part of the Japan section that involved shapeshifting. This part employed a stretch effect to make the fox character appear to morph into a woman. It was working well but I felt that it needed something more. I pictured a series of interweaving lines serving to connect the two figures. Enter our super handy trim paths. I had used these in the revamped intro and really liked the effect. When used in this section though, the mass of tangled lines filling in at different speeds looked out out of place against the background. To remedy this, I used a scatter effect. So the lines began scattered, reformed, and then scattered again before the change from fox to woman was complete. This was the added piece this section needed.
Much of the remaining work was devoted to improving the timing on gestures an facial expressions. I also added text to certain sections. Where this didn’t quite work in the aforementioned fox/dog clip, I feel that it added to the introduction of Zeus and the pre-chase scene in the America section.
I’m feeling really positive about how things have turned out as the project nears the final stages. I could continue to endlessly tweak and change things, but it’s starting to feel complete. The positive response I have gotten on this so far has made me consider doing more of these. Possibly a larger series, maybe one that involves other animals and myths. We’ll see what the future holds for the fox, but this piece has let me explore new techniques and served as a focus for my illustration. It reminds me of this video I saw a while back that talks about having a direction for your creative efforts. This project has been a great way to showcase what I can do and is the culmination of the skills I have developed over the past few years.