PASSWORD: HSBCYCN
Whereas the last project fed off the final animation of last year, the big pushing point for this one was Snow Dinosaurs, the animated Christmas card we made during Workshop Week. Another inspiration was the Manchester film festival a few of us went to. I decided to use vectors as they were a fairly quick and nice looking technique, and of course, that's what Snow Dinosaurs was done in. To be honest, this project is so closely tied to Sara's workshops I've included it in the showreel for that segment.
The initial pitch for this project was to make a series of short animations detailing people trying to build houses and it going horribly wrong. Setting myself the target of a week per animation, I dived into the work pretty early, starting work on the biscuit house that was the most fully formed. After a short series of doodles I started work on the artwork. The biscuits came together really quickly. I guess I do have a lot of experience with biscuits. The process was made far more interesting when I discovered the wealth of brushes illustrator has at its disposal. Using them I could create genuinely chocolatey looking chocolate, crumbs, and the rough edges biscuits need. I also made the cutting board and backgrounds using the same methods.
I then pulled all of the assets into After Effects and set to work laying out the structure and hit the single big snag of this project. Animating fifty biscuits is a huge task. Within about half an hour the scope of the project plummeted from four animations to one. In retrospect I'm really glad about that though. It allowed me to make a really clean final piece and polish it to a great degree.
The huge animation task has taught me a huge amount about efficiency in After Effects. It became a task of copying animation cycles and adapting them for each example. The first biscuit spill is a fairly obvious example of this whilst the assembly near the end is a far more subtle use, only borrowing small motions each time. Layering became a big task here too. As the final house needed biscuits to layered in a very specific way, it resulted in the piles looking very shortbread-orientated. To combat that I added a second set of biscuits that would disappear halfway through to make the piles look more even.
Due to various things going a little wrong those 100 biscuits grew and grew. The total is somewhere around 150 now. This animation required a fairly excessive amount of bug-fixing as the sheer volume of biscuits kept stepping out of line. It took quite a while to stop the amount of visible biscuits moving when they shouldn't be.
As well as making the animation and the type you can find elsewhere, I put together some game demo screens for a theoretical smartphone game. Using some assets from before and some new ones I put together three rather nice looking demo screens.
To conclude, I have mixed feelings about this unit. Not about the work, as that stands up as some of the best I've done. It's just that the scale is smaller than my usual stuff and it isn't particularly experimental. But I guess that's the standard when you're working for industry. I'm still really happy with the outcome and the art assets have cropped up all over the place since.
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