Life in Motion
Working in Motion Design can make you a generalist at most tasks. You become a compositor, VFX artist, graphic designer, animator, editor, etc. You must be adept at floating from one program to another and learning how each can enhance the other to achieve the best final piece.
Motion design start to finish (taking a script and bringing it to life)
Receiving a script. Read through it and start breaking down how you envision everything. Things like style, pacing, narrator’s voice, music, and sound effects bring the animation to life, making the viewer understand the content and give a genuine feeling.
After reviewing the script and having an idea in mind, continue to storyboard or style frame what you want the animation to say and look like. Storyboarding is usually chosen when it is a large animation, and the breakdown of everything is needed on how one scene transitions to another. Style frames are more when the client is more open and wants an overall feel for the video where 3–5 scenes will be mocked up almost as a final polished state. When going with style frames, it is always good to show the client a few options, so they have a part in choosing the style and perhaps even merging two different styles together.
Post storyboarding or style framing. Moving into applications such as Illustrator or Photoshop to create assets — choose backgrounds, supporting icons, and characters. Consider the overall appearance here, where a colour board is selected, and everything seems to line up. Ask yourself if it’s more realistic or exaggerated? Are there strokes that outline objects, or is it straight fill with highlights and shadows? This is where a huge chunk of the video takes place. The more you can get it looking like a final piece, the better. It will save time to animate less because you have an overall scene to hold the viewer’s eye and, upon sign-off, fewer revisions to assets when moving into Adobe After Effects.
After Effects is where we bring all this hard work to life. The common components within each layer: rotation, position, scale, opacity, and all of the effects within the effects panel. Don’t get me started on third-party plugins. The possibilities are endless! Here inside after effects, the sky is your limit. Knowledge, time, and drive determine how effective this video will be. You can use visual effects, rotoscoping, particle systems, colour grading, or bring more dimension to your animation by turning to 3D. You can hop inside a 3D program like Cinema 4D to model, light texture, animate, and then send out passes to be colour graded inside after effects.
Premiere Pro is where you can make the cuts and transitions to scenes while following audio cues and have your animation hit on the beat. Use adjustment layers to colour correct footage and nail down that look you are going for. Adjust audio to dip and fade with narration and maybe have the audio pass through the left and right channel, so you get that passing by effect when wearing headphones. Use speed ramping to give a scene more life or make those cuts hit right on audio queues.
Lights, action, render. You have done all that hard work through design and knowledge of various programs to get this final piece. It is time to render. Where most animations are saved as h.264 codec to create a low file size video and hold a large percentage of detail. It is always good to keep this rendering part in mind when quoting or billing a client; it can use up quite a bit of time and needs a powerful computing system for faster render times.
People who have influenced me (JR Canest, Fraser Davidson, Seth Eckert)
Agencies (Tendril, Giant Ant, Cub Studio, Golden Wolf, The Mill)
