SCHOOL OF MOTION: EXPLAINER CAMP

(STUDENT WORK)

Description

This particular course covered the process of creating an explainer animation from start to finish. Students choose one of three briefs to develop for the duration of the course. As well as a script and some brand guidelines, we were provided with professional voice-over to use in our projects.

The Brief

For this course, I chose to develop the Veruna: Clean Water 30-second PSA. The main goal was to drive people to the Veruna website and donate to help the organization. It was important to communicate:

• The scope of the water crisis without making people feel down about the situation.

• A transformation of contaminated water into clean, drinkable water.

• Veruna URL

It was not necessary to depict the Veruna Water System used to produce clean water, which afforded the chance to be more abstract and dynamic with how things could be represented.

Concepts

Started with looking into some information on desalination and purification. Brainstorming and sketches helped me wrap my head around the subject matter.

Design

Studying the script and gathering style ideas into mood boards helped to calibrate the general direction for story boarding and the development of an animatic. For this project, it was also important to take some time to prototype and articulate key elements before investing too heavily down a 3D path.

Examples of early look development and technical tests.

Below is an example of a key visual system starting to work as intended after a number of experiments.

Execution

I felt the chosen approach allowed good opportunities to convey the important points of the brief in a compelling and visually distinct way. Although building the project in 3D presented a number of challenges, it was an appropriate context to put theory into practice and expand my experience working in this medium. I utilized a variety of functions to achieve the desired results. This ranged from familiar territory like manually animating elements and dynamics to more unfamiliar areas like volumes and fields to generate the liquid-like elements.

It was very useful to go through the development of an explainer animation from start to finish in parallel with the instructor and fellow students. Timely feedback from our assigned TA was a good way to check one did not veer off course too much. Overall, the experience has been insightful and certainly taught me another level of appreciation for the amount of work that goes into explainer animations!

School of Motion was kind enough to give a shout-out for my project: Facebook | Instagram