Cuddle Product Video Breakdown: Transitions 🎬
Earlier this year, we worked on a product video for Cuddle.ai mobile app.
It’s a simple tool video that showcases what Cuddle.ai is capable of.
In this article, I’m going to talk about the types of transitions I made use of in our product video, so let’s get started! 🙌
Transitions are a way to bridge one scene with another — it is the connection between the end of a scene or sequence and the start of another. The best transitions are the ones which appear seamless and is consistent with the flow of the narrative. It can also be used as a cinematic tool to convey a certain mood or emotion, show the passage of time, or to even separate parts of the story depending on how it’s used.
Motion graphics/short-form animated media can be an amazing tool to put forward ideas, concepts, explainers, and stories in a fun and visual manner. If effectively used, it can make the conveyed information absorbable and impactful.
There are a lot of techniques that can be used for transitions in motion graphics like morphing, dolly zoom, and so forth.
In this blog post, I’ll be going through a few transition types we used in our product video~
📹 Dolly Out + Linear Wipe
Dolly Out transition is a type of zoom-out camera movement.
One of the main features of the Cuddle.ai app is “Ask”, which we wanted to focus on at the beginning of the product video.
We use a dolly-out transition to reveal that Ask is a part of the app, and thereby use this opportunity to introduce the mobile application while focusing on the “Ask” feature.
For a seamless colour theme transition, we use linear wipe animation.
📹 Zoom In + Trucking
Trucking is a type of camera movement transition where the camera moves horizontally. In this scene, we wanted to focus on “Track” feature of Cuddle. Using elements from the design to support the text was a no brainer. We achieved this by hiding elements that were not required in the succeeding scene.
📹 Comprehensive Reveal Transformations
A lot of motion design techniques can be used to aid transition between scenes. Reveal transitions are one of them, which is self-explanatory. It is used to reveal something. This is how we used reveals in our video ~
🎞 Masking + Fading
In this reveal transition, elements were masked and it was animated to reveal required components. Other components were hidden using fading.
🎞 Position Changes + Fading
This is a simple revealing technique using fade transitions to reveal new elements. Positions of old elements were also animated to aid the transition to the new scene.
🎞 Dolly In + Reveal
Dolly In is a zoom-in type of camera movement transition that reveals portions within a scene. This type of transition can also be played around with to transition to scenes which isn’t a part of the original scene. Like in this case, the text isn’t a part of the scene until we’ve zoomed in, slight tweaking and using text animation makes it look like it is a part of the scene, resulting in a seamless transition.
With the entire sequence, we wanted to show that powerful diagnostics run on all tracked business areas, and you receive alerts (now called Nudges) based on them. This is how the sequence looks like with the reveal and dolly in transitions ~
This brings me to another point, creatively reusing elements from preceding scenes can help maintain continuity and make the transitions look seamless, and also delightfully surprising.
📹 Morphing
Morphing, as the name suggests, can be used for transitions by transforming elements in the current scene. Following are two examples of a lot of cards combining and morphing into three cards. This is to imply that these alerts (Nudges) are formed based on diagnostics that run on followed business areas.
This is a simple info-card, which morphs into data points, representing information from Cuddle app that is being shared to peers across the region.
📹 Elemental Transitions
This is a tool video showcasing what you can do with Cuddle App, so obviously there were a lot of UI elements that had to be focused on while keeping the story of the app usage journey in mind.
Data visualizations for answers to what you ask in Cuddle is tailored to what is best suited for the question. To represent the variety of data visualisations and to transition between UI states, we’ve used 3D elemental animations.
We have used elemental transitions like zooming in to the UI components and focusing on the UI interaction.
So these are the main types of transitions we used to tell our product story.
I hope you learnt something from this 🙌
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