life of andyman

Ok, everybody:

At my video job, one of our clients is a Biopharmaceuticals company. We shot some video for them and put it onto a DVD that they can give to potential clients and play at trade shows.

About 2 months ago, my boss asked me to design the storyboards for a opening animation to precede the main video on the DVD. He said he wanted something based on a very complicated animation from the corporate parent of the company. But, he wanted ours to be faster and include pictures. Once I designed the storyboards, he’d send them to the animator he typically hires to actually animate it.

So, 2 months ago, I began to design those storyboards. It took me perhaps a full week or two weeks in PowerPoint to design them. The PowerPoint included 32 slides, each with text description of the animated events that would be occurring.

Finally, when I had that done, we were all a bit apprehensive about anyone understanding the depth of detail–other than me, since I made it. So, I took what at the time was a huge plunge. I said, “I think I’d like to try to animate it.”

Now, before this project began I knew, practically speaking, nothing about Adobe After Effects. Even as I offered to attempt to do the complex animation myself, I was scared it would prove to be way out of my league–but I wanted to try.

Coming from almost zero knowledge of After Effects it took me about a month and a half to design the completed animation, which was finally, finally finished a few days ago. I don’t know exactly how much time I spent on the project–whose completed run time is a mere 1 minute and 15 seconds–but I’m sure I spent beyond 120 hours, or three weeks of full-time work. Since I was learning, I think this is okay. Next time I have an After Effects project, I’m sure it will take much less time. Because now, ladies and gentlemen, I am allowed to call myself a professional animator. Upon receipt of the completed animation, I was touched to hear the clients approval: “exceeds expectations” and “watching it gave me the chills” were two things the clients actually said.

And that made me extraodinarily happy. Because the goal, really, for anyone who does anything in the arts, is to give the audience chills, isn’t it?

Anyway, I’m both glad to have gotten the opportunity to learn and to finish something that I’m quite proud of. It’s still not fully professional-grade, I think (it wasn’t as good as the Cook corporate one which inspired it, but which is quite different)–but it’s pretty good considering I didn’t know how to animate at all before I began the project.

Without further adieu, here it is: The Overview Animation.  Keep in mind Youtube makes it look a bit more compressed than the real version: