Introducing Bret Victor - Animation
Communications Studio | 2022 Spring
Audio
Song: Old Sport from Bromeliad Library
I initially started my search for background music on Spotify, specifically searching for techno music that had a strong beat and an optimistic tone.
As seen here:
However, they did not really match Victor’s tone and chosen script so I went with something more emotional and motivating instead.
Designer Audio: The Humane Representation of Thought Lecture
Editing the audio and matching the music was quite hard as I was unfamiliar with the software and had trouble ending the music naturally in advance.
Storyboard
Story and mood board
The imagery for this animation started by collaging visuals based on the keywords from the audio script. Though these are very much “google-stock-image” aesthetic, I only really use them for inspiration in terms of attributes. It was interesting to explore what would words such as “virtualization”, “disembodiment”, “possibility”, and “dehumanization” looked like, and what they meant as a whole narrative.
Asset Creation
As usual, I try to create new visuals after nailing down the general idea. I played around with different textures and decided to incoperate cyber punk elements. There wouldn’t be enough time for rigging, so I had to set up the scene in a way that could create a cohesive narrative just through change in position, scale, and rotation. There are actually many things you can do with just these three things. During this process, I also found that the light reflecting on the metal material was very interesting as things rotated around, so I also decided to render a short clip of just that visual to insert somewhere.
Animating in Maya
At this point, I was still unsure about the timing and had to switch between after effects and maya many times to make sure the keys synced up. It was still off after rendering about 1000 frames, but I used different glitch and timing effects to fix that.
Rendering
Premier pro was used to combine these sequences into a full video.
Open Source
Another resource I found and used during this project is this website. It was really cool to see something like this as everything was very customizable. I definetly would use this website again for something specific, but not rely on it for anything more as it has a specific style that is not my work.
Animating in After Effects
This is just the usual, using pre comps and stuff. Had a hard time rendering so I was only able to catch details and mistakes by rendering the whole video around 10 times. I hope after effects becomes stronger soon, rendering is so much pain!
Resources
Youtube is a great teacher, I love open source, everything should be open source, like adobe subscriptions.
Something that I realized though, is that because I already am trying so many different mediums, the use of so many effects didn’t really help me make things look cohesive.
