How Odd - Short (short) Film
In November of last year, I decided to take Learn Squared's new motion design class taught by the extremely talented Jorge R. Canedo Estrada. It'd been a while since I had done motion "for fun". Usually design/illustration is more intuitive for me because it's less technical, but I had been wanting a challenge.
The class was wonderful... and definitely a challenge. I knew I didn't want to do a small project, which is of course why I took forever for the assignment. But boy did I learn a lot. The assignment was to choose a quote to animate a story around.
I chose:
“How odd that I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words. ”
I knew that I wanted to play with color/shape/texture, but lately have also been into character design. Hence the idea to have a character to attempting to communicate to a second character through shape and color. I wanted the piece to feeling strangely offsetting which is why I chose Judd Greenstein's (w Nadia Sirota/Son Lux) piece In Teaching Others We Teach Ourselves.
From there I started pulling together inspiration for a moodboard and deciding on my color palette. Color is one of my favorite parts of design so I went through a few different iterations before choosing the one I did. The palette was inspired by Hvass and Hannibals beautiful design (also pictured in the moodboard).
From their I began sketching out rough concepts for the video. This took a while. I wish in retrospect I hadn't only sketched out the style frames, but also put some real thought into how the design would flow from one frame to the next. My usual go-to is to wing it once I jump into After Effects, but I'm beginning to realize planning in all stages of a project is important.
I took animation one scene at a time. There was a lot of head scratching during the process. And researching. Watching. Doing. Re-doing. Clicking. Head-against-wall banging.
One of my most valuable take aways from this class is just how much you can learn by going frame by frame through a creatives work. Usually I find that if I get a general impression of a project I'm set. But sometimes the true a-ha moments are in those fleeting frames that I often miss.
All dem comps.
The push to the finish line was a bit rough. When I work on projects by myself there are a lot of benefits. Setting my own schedule, having total control of aesthetic, etc. But I find that I also don't know when to stop, because I want to keep on tweaking / adding / deleting. Sometimes you just have to decide, okay, DONE.
I probably should have chosen that Dali quote about never reaching perfection instead!
All of that being said, I had a lovely time working on this project. If you are looking to up your mograph game, I highly suggest enrolling in Learn Squared's motion design class! I have a feeling I'll continue to do more passion projects where I learn a ton on the way.
Happy 2017!
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