After brainstorming topic ideas and selecting which principles I want to highlight, I settled on my top three choices: autumn, angels, and tea.
Tea Mind Map
Angel Mind Map
Autumn Mind Map
Thumbnails
After thinking over what I could do with each one of my topic ideas, I decided to settle on an autumn theme. My idea for my motion project is to focus on one singular leaf falling throughout the animation. As the leaf falls, each one of the principles will be highlighted. For example, a much larger leaf will fall past the main leaf to illustrate proportion, another leaf will float by in another direction to show direction, and so on.
Below are my thumbnail sketches that show a rough idea of how I want my final product to look:
Autumn Thumbnails
Mood Board
After deciding on my theme, I started to play around with what type of aesthetic I want to go for. Because my theme is autumn, I want to use a lot of warm, comforting colors and rough, natural-looking typefaces. However, after looking at examples of fall imagery, I also think including some soft cool colors would be a nice touch as well.
Autumn Mood Board
Style Frames
The first idea for the style of my animation is to keep everything very simple. I thought about animating very simple illustrations that are just white outlines, while using a more decorative typeface to help the principles stand out.
For the second idea for my motion project, and the idea that I’m leaning more towards, I wanted to focus on a more collage-like aesthetic. I wanted to use photos that I’ve taken and cut out the parts that I want to move throughout the animation. I also wanted to use a typeface that reflected the collage aesthetic, so I decided to experiment with BlackCasper.
For my final style frame, I wanted to combine the styles of my two previous frames, including both illustrative elements and photography. I illustrated the trees, then used photographs for the grass and sky, using effects in Illustrator to help them blend in with the rest of the design.
Storyboards
These are the storyboards I drew after deciding on my aesthetic and refining my plan for my animation.
Final Composition
A lot of learning and experimenting went into this project. My original idea for this project is nothing like what ended up being my final composition. My colors ended up being a lot warmer than what I had originally planned, and I ended up using Sedgwick Ave as my typeface instead of the other ones that I had on my moodboard. Despite this project not completely going to plan, I am still very happy with the result and I have seen a lot of improvement in myself. The original narrative of my motion remains the same — a leaf falls from a tree to help illustrate the principles I used, and suddenly the season changes to winter. Overall, although I had a lot of issues working on this second project, I am still very happy with how this turned out.
