Bringing still images to life using animation. As an integrated designer I always look for ways to utilise my skills to enhance project possibilities and provide additional solutions. Recently I had the opportunity to utilise these skills on some company promotional literature that was to be mailed out to prospective clients.
Apple: The apple was a difficult subject, as the obvious would be to show the apple first without the ‘heart bite’ and then with it, but without have a tacky crunching bite sound to enhance this impression to the viewer it just wouldn’t work. So I decided to take some inspiration from the cinemagraph apps and keep it simple by creating a soft continuous zoom that generates some subtle but elegant movement to the scene.
Heart neon light: The first task within this concept simply involved turning the neon light off and then have it switch on, blinking and flickering like an old neon light sign. For me the quickest option and the one that provided the most control for this was to prepare a second ‘off’ state image within Photoshop that I could then switch between the ‘on’ state. In After Effects I switched between the ‘on’ and ‘off’ layers and used a variable wiggle expression to generate the different levels of flickering.
Umbrella: This image is all about the umbrella with its strong contrasting bright red against the dark monotone cityscape. All I needed to do was to make it rain! Although I utilised the CC rainfall effect to give the impression of heavy rain, I found it just didn’t provide the level of realism I was after. I had the idea of having droplets running down the screen and started looking at how it would be possible to create this effect in After effects. During my research I came across a fantastic tutorial from the guys at Video Copilot (Kramer, 2017).
Leaf: Making a video of a plant growing at speed seems a very difficult challenge without using some kind of time lapse camera, never mind trying to achieve this effect from a static image. By keeping the majority of the animation out of focus disguises the more crude aspects of the animation, but also provides some depth to the scene as the camera navigates its way through the growing plants. A simple mask path with a ‘reveal original image’ set on the keyframe of the stroke was enough to achieve the desired result.
Project Details
Client Hanson Zandi
Date February 2019
Skills Animation, Video
References:
Iabuk.com. (2018). Smartphone video is fastest growing online ad format. [online] Available at: https://www.iabuk.com/press-release/smartphone-video-fastest-growing-online-ad-format [Accessed 12 Aug. 2019].
Photomirage.io. (n.d.). PhotoMirage. [online] Available at: https://www.photomirage.io/en/ [Accessed 12 Aug. 2019].
Kramer, A. (2017). New Tutorial: Realistic Rain Drop FX!. [online] Video Copilot Blog. Available at: https://www.videocopilot.net/blog/2017/01/new-tutorial-realistic-rain-drop-fx/ [Accessed 14 Aug. 2019].