Design Hero Animation

Susan Kare

Thursday, April 6th

Next up in the design hero project is the animation:

Project Brief: Using the work you’ve done on your poster and booklet, create a short video with your design hero as the subject. This video should be consistent with your poster and booklet but will use motion, time and sound. You will write a script and storyboard your idea before executing it. You will gather and curate your subject’s voice (through interviews, lectures and existing videos/films) which will act as the “spine” of your video. You will also use typography, images, information graphics, color, music and other sound effects to give your piece depth, excitement and resonance.

Size: 1920 x 1080 pixels

Time: 1–1.5 minutes

The first step was to think about sound. For me, the sound really influences the rest of the project since it determines the pacing of the video and also what I actually want to animate. I started with a talk she gave at a conference, but I needed to pick and choose what to include since it was a 20 minute talk.

I started with downloading the audio, and deciding what parts and stories I wanted to feature, so I first cut out 4.5 minutes, and then cut that to 2.5. Since her speaking isn’t very concise, I was able to cut out a lot of pauses, and tried to fade things to make it smoother and natural.

I also worked on finding the music, which took less time than expected, as one of the first songs I looked through on the Bromeliad library seemed to fit perfectly to me.

I worked for a while to find little things I could cut, and also making the audio sound more natural as if there weren’t even any cuts (even though there were many). I even learned Logic Pro in order to have more control over cross-fading the audio (although I had to take it back into Final Cut Pro in order to use the voice isolation).

After starting my audio, I also worked on a very rough storyboard. I created it as a fresco motion file so I could easily export multiple PNGs from it, and create a video storyboard by adjusting the timing of the frames to go along with my audio track.

Tuesday, April 11th

Now that I had a solid(ish) plan in my head and on paper, I could start animating. Because my scenes are relatively separate and don’t have a need for complex transitions between assets, I decided to use a workflow where I make my assets as I go along. This way, I could make decisions about the style of my assets to go along with the animations I create, and not have to remake assets later if they don’t work.

This ended up being a very good thing, since I had to abandon some of my plans to import assets from Illustrator and Photoshop since the precise pixels didn’t always translate to After Effects. Unfortunately, this meant many of my assets needed to be created directly in After Effects, which is more time consuming as I am less familiar with it.

I started at the beginning with the scenes of typing out the characters, and the tool drawing the icon. I created a vector illustration of the tool and a lightbulb in Illustrator. For the lightbulb, I also created a version of the shape that was one continuous line so I could animate the tool drawing it.

I also created a preliminary animation for the control panel. For this, I first edited the control panel I already had in photoshop to remove some of the elements that I wanted to animate (the sound bar slider, selected buttons, clock, etc).

Then I made all of the animated sections separately, and imported them all into After Effects. I also learned a new tool — expressions. Basically, you can use code to edit a transform property. So, I used this to create the blinking cursor and menu so I wouldn’t have to make hundreds of keyframes.

Next, I worked on the MacPaint tools section. I copied over my previous files into Illustrator and Photoshop (since things weren’t importing pixel-perfect), and separated out the tools panel (besides the shape tools since those were repetitive). I also inverted every tool (how they look when selected) so that I could create an animation to bring it to life more.

I also created a simple vector version of each tool, taking some inspiration from the current adobe tool icons.

I also recreated the watch in After Effects (since the import from Illustrator distorted the pixels) with the hands separated in each position.

So this is what I had to start with:

Sunday, April 16th

Last Tuesday, we looked at what everyone had so far, and I got some feedback. Some things were simple and minimum (like fixing the sound effect volume). However, there was a larger consideration about the “thousands of icons” section. Although I and others like the animation of drawing the icon, it was very fast, and the icons zooming out were very repetitive. It also wasn’t her icon in any way, and would seem a bit disconnected from the rest of the video. Keeping in mind the next scene, I decided to scrap the idea and start over.

I kept the idea of drawing the icon, but instead I used the happy mac, and then zoomed out to the windows and apple icons I used in earlier projects. I then used this as an opportunity to transition to the next scene, and animate it with the icons.

Then I worked on the scene transitioning out from that with the icon editor. I created two windows in After Effects (to once again avoid pixel issues). For the icon window, I animated a grid being drawn over the icon.

Then for the hex code window, I typed out the binary representation by hand and converted it into hex values. I was going to type it out with text, but because the pixels didn’t line up, I decided to create each character and write it out by hand by copying the characters.

Then when the mouse clicks on the pixel, it changes the value in the hex editor as well.

Tuesday, April 18th

Now I had to start animating the scenes related to the command key, which is technically half of the animation, but it shouldn’t take as long since I already have the plan, and most of it doesn’t involve manipulating pixels (which was often time consuming). However, it does involve more technical skills in order to achieve some 3D like effects.

I started with the first scene though, since it was still in the pixel style (with Steve Jobs and the apples). First, I made the apple form by pixels, although since they were just coming from off of screen, their starting points didn’t need to be precise, so it was much easier than the animation in the beginning. Then I remade Steve Jobs in After Effects, as well as a speech bubble. Then, I combined it all together.

Saturday, April 22nd

To start on the command key castle section, I first made the simpler animation of the icon pixelating and re-vectorizing when she talks about it being abstract, which I did in Illustrator so I could easily use the grid tools. I started with the original 12 pixel icon, and then made a vector version based on that grid system (so it would have the same stroke width on the vertical and horizontal lines). I then made a few more versions by doubling the amount of pixels so I could transition between them.

In the meantime, I started looking up different effects I could use to create the castle animation. My original plan was to just rotate and scale the icon so it looked in perspective, but I found the corner pin warp tool which looked much better. I then created a copy of this shape and transformed it down.

The more difficult and tedious part was the walls. I started with a small composition of just a gray rectangle growing downward, which I could then use for the walls so I could update the color or texture very easily later. I then used corner pin and bezier warps to make each wall individually, including the front and back of each turret, and the center walls. I also had to redo this a couple of times to figure out how to properly order all of the layers so that lines weren’t crossing over the castle when they weren’t supposed to. In the end though, I was really happy with it, and glad I learned a new skill for the future.

Thursday, April 27th

Next, I worked on the symbol dictionary animation. The idea for this was to use a simple vector style (like the icon already is), create a few more icons, and make it look like a book or page flipping open. First I made the icons in Illustrator, then made a composition for each page in After Effects. I then used the bezier warp tool, and animated that so it would look like a page opening (although I had to redo this quite a few times because of issues being unable to set “re-rendering” on without messing up the warp).

I also worked on my initial ending idea, where the symbol goes onto the key, and it pans up to a computer. This first attempt wasn’t great though, and there were many issues since I was trying to make flat 2D images stay together as a 3D object by just perspective warping.

Tuesday, May 2nd

Now that everything was mostly animated, I could start fixing and tweaking things. First up though was the ending, which desperately needed attention. After taking a detour back to my poster, I decided to use the same colored image. I also vastly simplified the animation, and kept the image flat since the perspective wasn’t working, but was also overly complex.

Then, I had some smaller tweaks to make. I first wanted to see if I could change the apple animation. It never seemed quite right, especially the second part. My first thought was to possibly use the real apple logo (which you can actually just insert as text on a Mac ). However, it didn’t fit with the rest of the video at all.

The other thought I had was to make the apples smaller. They were taking up a large proportion of the screen, and were hard to make out at that scale. I also tried to space them out more during the falling animation so you could see them individually more.

I also received a suggestion on how to improve the hex codes animation. I was hesitant at first, mostly because I knew it meant repositioning all 256 digits by hand again. The idea was to have each digit rotate between all the options before settling on the correct one.

I started by making the extra digits that I didn’t need before since they never appeared (5, 6, A, B, C, D). Then I put those into a tall stack on one composition, and for each different digit I moved their order so the final one was on top. Then I made another composition for each digit where I animated the previous composition’s position within a one-digit high window.

Finally, I remade the hex code window by positioning all of the digits. However, this looked quite static since they all fell into place at the same time. So, it was time for my favorite new tool of expressions.

I used time remapping on each digit, and used the following expression to randomize each starting and ending time within a range:

This also means I can easily tweak the entire animation later, and don’t have to move 256 keyframes individually (I’ve done it before, and don’t want to do it again).

Finally, I just had a few slight tweaks to make, including adding some sound effects, and fixing a few mistakes I noticed. Now I had my final video: