Product Content

Ideation | Design | Animation | Mentoring Junior

This animation was created as part of a larger course focused on producing product content for eCommerce sites.

I collaborated with a junior animator to come up with ideas, develop the visual style, and bring the animation to life.

The junior animator I worked with was very passionate about traditional-style animation, and I wanted to demonstrate that we could achieve a similarly textured look in After Effects giving us more flexibility.

I handled the rigging for both the lamp and the cursors. The lamp rig was fairly straightforward: strokes had ends parented to nulls, so animating the nulls allowed the stroke points to follow. I also parented a hinge for the lamp's arm joint.

The lamp’s head was a bit more complex, although simpler than it might appear. I began by animating the lamp turning from one side to the other, a mostly frame by frame process designed to simulate the foreshortening effect as the lamp moved toward and away from the camera. Once that was in place, I time remapped the composition and linked it to a slider, which controlled the side to side movement of the head. By combining this with a simple rotation in the main composition, we achieved a wide range of control over the lamp’s head movement.

We spent a considerable amount of time developing a color palette that suited this project. Instead of having the lamp simply lighten the layers beneath it, we wanted full control over the color changes.

To accomplish this, I separated the light beam from the head movement so it could serve independently as a matte for an adjustment layer. This adjustment layer used multiple Change to Color effects to achieve each color transition when the light beam touched parts of the scene. Tweaking these parameters was quite challenging, as the effect needed to work seamlessly with the boiling effect applied to the rough edges of our shapes. Getting the edges to look neat was tricky.

We also collaborated closely with other team members—including 3D artists and compositors to integrate our designs and animations with real world environments alongside a presenter.