Lifting Tower - Production

On the 24th October, Vlad and I met with Jimmy with all of our ideas and he looked through our storyboards. He picked out his favourite idea, which is the storyboard below.

So, after meeting with Jimmy he explained the changes that needed to be made, which was that the Christmas pudding would have to be outlined in white and no use of the colour brown. He also asked us to consider using the window/door in the building in our animation so that it would be a little more interactive with the surroundings, so we decided that the balls in the first scene should fly out of the door to start the animation instead of the side.

First, we began by sending Jimmy placeholder images and Me and Vlad both drew these up in Photoshop, which would then later become the assets for the After Effects animation. We split the work loads and drew 2 each of the ideas. (Vlad drawing the Christmas pudding/snowflake and I drawing the wreath/ornament).

Above are my drawings, placed on the template given by Jimmy.

Above are the drawings done by Vlad, again placed on the template.

We then began to animate in After Effects! This was something Vlad and I decided to do completely together, as the animation had to flow seamlessly, we thought it best to animate together on the same file instead of going away and doing so individually. So, we sat together for many hours and put together the full animation based on both of our opinions and combined these to create each transition between our pre-drawn up assets.



Here we drew a path for the ornaments to follow, coming out of the door as previously planned. We made sure to create the animation using the template so that when projected it would work perfectly with the surroundings.



We used lots of motion blur to make the animation flow easier, as well as lots of rotations and fading in and out between each object.



The motion of the bow/leaves on the wreath and pudding were also precomposed using DUIK so that when put into the final composition everything was animated and not static, this made a much more realistic effect.



Light burst and ray effects were also used so that the animation would glow and look great projected at night time!

So, after getting all the basic motion finished it was then time to put any little finishing touches onto the animation, such as tweaks on the motion, following through action ect. And finally show it to Jimmy for his last check on the animation before submission!