How I Made This Advanced Animation (Process Breakdown)

hey everyone my name is imani larussa and today i'm going to show you the complete beginning to end process of how i created this [Music] this is going to be a process breakdown video not a step-by-step tutorial because i want to show you guys how an advanced animation like this is made from beginning to end so let's hop right into it like with every art piece we start off with ideas and i'm a very music oriented artist so i found this song by garden city movement called before i fall and it was a huge inspiration i listened to this song on repeat and i really got the message i wanted to tell in this piece and i was trying to illustrate my internal process of working through the hardest time of my life i was dealing with a lot of severe anxiety attacks and i felt like my light had dimmed so low that i stopped seeing my future as i'm traveling through this false reality i could finally see that when i filled my life up with mindfulness that i could finally discover a new place in this universe and that's what i wanted this piece to illustrate so now i know what i want to make and now i'm going to take those words from the description of the piece that i want to create and i'm going to break those apart to see if i could come up with visual ideas and that's when i create my word tree this word tree is going to allow me to break down these words to come up with more visual ideas so i take these words and then i start searching them up and illustrations animations photos or even video i absolutely love these illustrations of these tarot cards and these portals with the doors and the columns i love this glass texture look and the silhouette with the red background totally stuck out to me also for climbing and getting over the obstacles i really had this idea of stairs and i couldn't help but remember the trippy scene from the big lebowski where he has those huge stairs and he metaphorically turns into a ball i love this idea of this ball like this crystal ball or like all scene and it super reminded me of this animated music video called town portals art is a shared culture there isn't an artist out there who isn't inspired by other artists so use the fact that we have easy access to all these different art mediums and start finding references so now that i look at all these different art references i just start having so many visual ideas and i start sketching i'm a very pen to paper artist so i have my little sketchbook and i start sketching very poorly but they don't need to be drawn out really well you just need to kind of word sketch vomit onto a piece of paper so that you can get your ideas out from your head onto here so that you can reference them later with your sketches you want to start coming up with ideas of how you're going to transition into each shot and it's going to be super important to do that in the beginning because it's going to save you a lot of work of backtracking in the end so moving into production i wanted to do a lot of camera work and i felt that the best way possible to do that considering i don't have a camera or a dolly is using cinema 4d the idea of using cinema 4d is that we're going to use it to create a mock-up so that we could use it as a reference for our shape layers and after effects and we do that because it creates an accurate perspective so instead of animating my paths and my shape layers into the action that i have in my head and potentially get the perspective wrong i can just create it in cinema 4d so i know exactly how it's going to animate out before i even begin animating it this is an advanced technique only because you have to have experience in cinema 4d but other than that it drastically cuts down the time that you're spending guessing how the animation will turn out and a lot of times you can use the assets from that cinema 4d render so for this first scene i wanted to create a room so i started with making this door and the floor and then i got this column on turbosquid which is a 3d asset website and when i created the door i made it green so that it stood out amongst all the other shapes and that i could key it out later in after effects then i rendered out a png sequence from cinema 4d and grabbed a frame and put it in illustrator because i'm going to recreate these assets so that i can bring them in after effects and i'm using illustrator because it's a lot easier to create shapes than it is in after effects as you can see this is a completely different color scheme than what i ended up going with but that's the whole fun of trial and error so as you can see in my final composition i have the original reference video in my composition the whole time because i kept going back to it because i was either tracing over it or just seeing how accurate the perspective was to my original render so i just went ahead and created these shape layers and frame by frame animated the path to follow along my original cinema 4d reference and i know you're seeing a lot of effects on each of those layers that is just because that is a plug-in from danny stern he created this super amazing textured plug-in called shade thrower you should really check it out and check him out on instagram as well he's an amazing animator and i had previously made this box growing out to make this really cool texture for another project that i ended up not using so i just kind of threw it in just because i had the asset and it was in the back of my mind so now animating in the floor and the background it goes along perfectly because i have my reference for the perspective next i have the column same thing i just used shape layers and i animated the paths frame by frame to fit along the original cinema 4d reference video i was also making sure that my gradients were following along with the perspective as well because i'm using the paths instead of the transform settings the gradients aren't going to follow along with it if i start moving the path so i had to go in and animate the gradients individually that's one thing to keep in mind when you are animating paths is making sure that your gradients are consistent with the path change next was this tricky frickin door i felt like i had a jimmy rigg this thing to make it work exactly how i wanted it to so after effects has a cinema 4d 3d renderer that you could use and you can use an extrusion depth on it so it makes all of your shape layers and text layers look like they're 3d but there's certain parts of it that don't work you cannot use blending modes or any gradients when you're using this cinema 4d renderer so i had to create this 3d shape add the extrusion depth on it in a cinema 4d renderer which you could change right here at the bottom and then i had a pre-compose that cinema 4d layer so i can still keep the attributes of the cinema 4d composition bring it into a new comp copy that original layer paste it into a new comp and then change the 3d renderer to classic 3d so that i can use the gradients and blending modes without losing that extrusion depth in my cinema 4d composition now i'm going to show you how the green door comes into play so i'm going to use this green door to mat out into the next shot so i'm going to take my final composition and key light out the green and use a track mat for the door so that it cuts it out perfectly in the shape of that green door and now you have your original composition with a transparent background on it which leads us into our next shot which is my favorite shot because it has such a weird perspective change onto it and i try to create like a vertigo shot on it and a vertigo shot is basically when you have a dolly and you are pulling back with the camera while you are zooming in and it creates this really cool perspective change and being that i don't have a dolly i did the next best thing and use cinema 4d for this really cool camera change so first i needed to create my scene which was pretty simple because all i was doing was making stairs and a door so it's a lot of rectangles and i made them all different colors because i was going to use the same concept of keying out the shapes in after effects and to create the perspective change i went into my camera settings in cinema 4d and changed the focal length while keyframing the position of the camera going up next i wanted to make this glass-like person filling up with the universe so i actually drew this in procreate because i personally love drawing and procreate more than photoshop i did end up cutting the face out completely just because i felt like it sold a little better when it didn't have a face and then i used the shape of the drawing to create a shape layer to create a matte so that i could fill this up with liquid and the liquid was just two layers with wave warp on it and it was offset a little so it had a organic liquid feel to it and then i did something that i thought was really clever i added a displacement on some of the stars that look like it was behind the glass that's what's super important about selling these animations is making it work with the environment if there is an object behind a glass would it have a displacement on it these are just questions that you want to ask yourself to really sell this piece to your audience and the last scene didn't have any crazy technical thing to it it was just a lot of key framing with the shape layers but one thing i was really proud of was trying to create the match cut between the pupil dropping down and the ball looping into the first scene and that's going to be the complete process video of how i did that from beginning to end i wanted to give you guys a thorough breakdown of how i did that just to show a little bit behind the scenes of how an animation like that is made i didn't want to give you a step-by-step tutorial i don't like doing those just because i feel like there are so many amazing artists who are already doing that and i just want to give you guys a little you know a little behind the scenes so um super appreciate you guys watching this video and 2022 i plan to make more youtube videos so thanks for watching and make sure to subscribe and have a great day

Channel: Emonee LaRussa

Views: 14,495

Keywords:

Id: RAOmMr-9NGA

Length: 10min 6sec (606 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/qerplonk]

Sweet! Loved the render chime in the title card. Added this to my watch list!