I made this simple looping animation as a base for a collaborative project with my students where we
each interpreted it in different styles adding our own elements to get a Multiverse effect .which is
currently All the Rage in this universe for my submission though I needed to challenge myself
and animate something I had never animated before so I looked around my desk for inspiration [Music]
here's my criteria my animation must be one beans two good and no this isn't sponsored by
Heinz other beans are available but I did want to make sure I wasn't accidentally endorsing
an evil Corporation so I Googled Heinz beans war crimes and got zero results as of time of
recording I felt safe to proceed I pulled up some references and started designing in illustrator
now having the black area of the label be a portal to a sea of beans and an endless void
was an obvious choice that I couldn't resist but I had two large challenges before me the first was
that vast ocean of beans I knew it would take a lot of time to create all of those beans in
perspective and make it look convincing and not like a bad video game texture first I needed to
figure out if I actually could make it look good at all before I committed just that much
of my life to beans so I quickly whipped up a rough version of what it might look like and
threw that into after effects to test it it wasn't pretty but it worked that gave me all
the reassurance I needed that it was going to be well worth my time making a more seamless
pattern that wasn't so obviously repeating and adjusting each individual beam so that
it was spaced evenly amongst its peers also making sure each gradient was in the right direction too
this took 12 weeks the other design decision that was giving me serious doubt was the detail of the
beans did I want to go for a more realistic Bean with some more complex gradients I'll keep it
stylized with just two colors the more detailed gradient did look surprisingly realistic but I
would have had to keep that detail consistent amongst all the beans and make that work with
the other Design Elements after I had created my beautiful sea of beans I eye dropped the gradient
fill from the detailed Bean onto the near infinite Mass this caused illustrator to stop responding I
eventually got the fills to take but illustrator was not happy about it and it didn't really look
any better I would still have to adjust each individual gradient to be all lit from the
same direction whilst illustrator was fading in and out of responsiveness and I couldn't in good
conscience do that to either of us they're realistic beans I had to give them the flick
the designs were done I cleaned them up into three tasteful style frames tidied up the illustrator
file and imported it into After Effects first I placed the cursor in its own separate comp I made
it bouncing Jitter by animating its position on a null then I started on the backgrounds I adjusted
the colors from my base animation and had separate comps for each background both being revealed by
this Luma matte I added a zoom to the bean ocean so it feels like we're flying above its beanie
Majesty now for the flying beans they are just animating their position and scale coming away
from the center nothing too fancy there but for one loop I wanted one of the beans took
a light with the cursor so I adjusted the path of one of the beans and animated its position
and shape path frame by frame for the last few visible frames so it looks like it's bouncing
away the last effect over the whole thing was a warp set to fisheye so it pinches in on the center
and gives a nice curve to the ocean of beans it's important to me that I showed a curved Horizon so
there can be no down out over the flatness of this Bean Planet if anything it would be Bean
shaped or maybe can-shaped which would allow for both a round and flat interpretation it's
entirely possible here is the final result and in glorious widescreen let me know if you think
I fulfilled my criteria what criteria you'd like me to approach my next animation with and if you
want to see my process of how I animated this project you'll want to check out this next video