I just released a collaborative project that I've been working on behind the scenes with
some students from my Master Motion Design course and in this video i'm going to be
breaking down exactly how i made this intro now i settled on the idea that we would start with an
alien character concentrating and that would open up a third eye in the middle of their forehead
and it would be shiny and colorful and really inviting and we'd maybe expect to travel in
through the third eye but instead we go up through the nose and there would be this overload of all
colorful elements flying past us as we travel up the nose and then eventually reach the mind
this is my initial design of the character that was done on pencil and paper and i tidied that
up a bit in procreate then i created a vector version in illustrator and tried some different
color options and finally settled on this version then i got to animating i animated the rough path
of a lot of elements frame by frame using calipe which is my new favorite ipad animation app and
first i did the hand to create the stylus reveal going from a pinch to an okay gesture and this is
just eight drawings in total we've got the start we've got the end and we've got two frames of
anticipation the hands pinching and squeezing a bit more towards the left and then it's just four
frames of them actually opening up and i think it came out really smooth but yes the starting pose
doesn't look all that much like a hand but i remembered some advice from the legend bern hogar
i did a couple of versions of the head tilting and going up the nose because
getting the right perspective is tricky even with a simple sphere like this
and i put those together with some simple motion in after effects and got this
then for the nose tunnel scene first i tried a method using shape layers in after effects
and i thought this looked pretty cool but it wasn't really giving me that intense
speed and twisting chaotic motion that i wanted so i searched far and wide for
a suitable reference and i finally found exactly what i was looking for
water slides i found a ton of videos from gopros going down really cool looking water slides slash
raves which had the exact energy that i wanted to convey so i chopped up some sequences from a few
flipped them scaled them and sped them up to varying degrees so i could use this as
a close reference to the speed and add additional elements later i also made a few different styles
of lines flying out from the center straight ones wiggly ones and lightning ones so that i could
line them up and put them on top of the slide reference my final rough animation looks like this
now before we get too deep up the nose of this character i really want to highlight and thank
all of the students that took part in this project the results absolutely knocked my socks off i was
taken aback by the amazing work they produced and just the diversity of styles here is all of their
work on screen and many of them are available for freelance work so if you need awesome animators
hit them up they're all linked in the description and some have already released breakdowns of their
pieces for this project so if you want a deeper look behind their work please check those out too
and if you're interested in taking the same journey if you enroll in the course before
the 21st of july and this next week you'll get exclusive and elusive bonus content two additional
assignments and a full project breakdown of this microscope animation which is over an hour long
and i'm going into all of the detailed details of exactly how i made it and that is of course on
top of the lifetime access to the eight weeks of practical lessons the project files and community
of amazing artists qb sound did an incredible job on the music and sound design for this project
as well sound is one of the best ways to bring animation to life and they absolutely nail it okay
back up the nose i cleaned up the rough animation of the hands and the head using shape layers
in after effects essentially tweaking the path property frame by frame over the rough animation
now for the hand where there are some strokes over some areas to define the shapes i added a shape
layer over the top with just a few lines in it and animated those frame by frame too now the single
hand just in isolation i am really happy with it works better as a standalone element than i was
expecting now together they're not that noticeable in the context of everything else going on the
intro though with the text and the third eye but maybe that's for the better because the hands
are backwards if you were to summon a stylist out of thin air like this your fingers would be
facing the camera now i did discover this before i animated them but i just think the design looks
way better this way the wrong way so maybe it's not the wrong way after all also the character
has no arms just has floating hands so it's entirely possible that holding it like this anyway
for the third eye i used an animated gradient technique that i teach in the course using an
effect stack of gradient ramp and colorama i used three different colored versions
and these rotating spokes as mattes for them then i slapped a pupil on top with a highlight
and really you can add any footage under a pupil and it will look like a cool eye
for the final version of the tunnel again frame by frame i lined up some shapes with the reference
footage and just added more chaotic elements over the top first these sharp gemstone boogers then
these frame by frame tunnel rings and then these discs at the end i made the top half of the tunnel
a different color to make it feel a little more structured and confined and less like an open
space then i added these lines that wrap around the edge of the tunnel then these yellow frame by
frame lines emerging out of the center that i mask some areas out of so they're not just overtaking
the screen and there are lines everywhere and the last elements i added were those thicker
lines and squiggles coming out from my center that were cleaned up with shape layers and a fade to
white at the end then i added some effects over everything some of my favorite looping texture
add a bit of grit to everything then a slight hand drawn boil to distress the edges of each
line and make it look a bit more hand drawn to merge the frame by frame and vector elements so
they look more cohesive then a really subtle shake so it looks like it's coming through a film reel
deep glow over the top of everything to make it feel a little dreamier and make the colors
a little lighter and then some really subtle noise and i took the frame rate down to 12
frames per second again to match the frame by frame elements that were animated at that
lower frame rate so it all just looks more cases and here's what everything looks like
together it was an absolute treat to work with so many techniques and elements in this sequence
and i hope this intro was a good enough lead into the amazing pieces
from the students if you haven't seen the full video yet you can watch it here