Motion Design Development

Todays post is focusing on my VCD302 project development regarding my motion design animation, to find out about my concept click here. Above is a collection of illustration designs and colours that has inspired my works.

Empathise & Define

At first, I had a lot of difficulties with my design process, this was partially because I kept changing my mind. I wanted to not only show information on dyslexia, but I also wanted to show it from a personal experience and convey emotion.

I began by brainstorming concepts, there were two solid ideas that I ideated:

• kinetic type:

As dyslexia is a language based developmental difference, I thought it would be interesting to show how written language could look from my own perspective. This worked by keyframing individual letters of words and changing their scale or positioning to make it seam as if the words and letters were moving around the page.

However, I soon realized kinetic type alone was lacking expression. Dyslexic people are visual learners and thinkers, so would it not be important to have visuals?

• Illustrated vector motion design, with some kinetic type:

The moment I began incorporating my illustrative strengths into the process my work flowed more naturally. All my illustrative designs were supported by a script I wrote, recorded and uploaded in After Effects. I’ve intended to focus on creating figures, backgrounds, silhouettes, and abstract shapes to match the spoken dialogue in the recording as this has defined the projects focus.

Ideate, prototype & test

 Using concept 2, I tested colour palettes for my illustrations and came up with thirteen colours. This may seem a bit extensive, but I wanted bright and contrasting characters to show that there is no one type of person when it regards dyslexia, also the colours signify a spectrum, much like neurodiversity does.

From the script I made some story boards and linked it to specific audio sections, these story boards were drawn in Adobe Illustrator. I created high detail from the starting point as this would allow me to grab content from the story board and drop it in as a layer in Adobe After Effects to test and ideate on. 

While I was creating tiles and scenes for the story board, I tried to keep in mind how I would be able to move the shapes. If I could not process it, then I left it out and focused on what would work as motion. As a result of this there were a few aspects that were cut from my ongoing motion design project as challenges came up in moving some of the illustrations. I spent a lot of time making small porotype compositions after this to prevent ongoing motion issues and to allow for a more organized workflow. To test my project I would render the file in progress and view it as a video, this removed any lag I had previously.

Critical moments

One of the biggest critical moments in this project development was failing often and regularly, for a long time I felt that the animation was not going anywhere. This lead me into idea two, as listed above, which was a game changer. Once I decided to animate illustrations I had more of a niche area to research, using videos and test I was able to figure out ‘pupating’ characters using the pin tool and key frames in after affects. As a result I have been able to give my characters subtle movement and expressions.

Thanks for the read!