These date back aaaages – firstly, it’s autumn 2012,. I was approached about making a showreel for branding/ad/marketing/web agency Five by Five (they do a lot of stuff). With this, I had to animate their static designs for use in their showreel, which meant I pulled apart all the PSDs they’d used to build websites, Facebook pages for TV shows, app walkthoughs and everything else besides. Not easy or quick, but I still managed to some new tricks and gained a couple of long term clients in the process –
A little more recently in October 2013 I took on this big batch of work for a long-standing client of mine, digital agency Mason Zimbler, and this was animating & editing their showreel.
Now, the vast majority of their work consists of websites, infographics & various ad campaigns, rather than “pure” motion graphics &, but right here is where I absolutely smashed it. I took a handful of (well, close to 15) their static web infographics (some 7500px high, with 500+ layers), organised them for animation in After Effects and added the magic sparkly stuff. Granted, most were never meant to be animated in the first place, several didn’t make it in at all, but animating each layer, adding camera moves and then speeding them up somewhat in the edit made for a killer piece.
Along with the infographics are website builds, app walkthroughs and composites with 3D models – again stripped down, organised & renamed before animating them all into shot in AE & C4D. Quite a workload for one man, but it looks well, with plenty of blink-&-you’ll-miss-it details dropped in here, there and everywhere.
Shortly after finishing up that one, I started on MZ’s Christmas video mailout which was based on an infographic they made for 2012. Animating this one didn’t make the final cut for the showreel, so with a little repurposing, I adapted it all for the screen. Again, it was a deliberately quick animation with lots of little throwaway details, all set to the wonderous muzak of the 12 Days Of Christmas.