The animation was done using Adobe AfterEffects and Illustrator. I did not have much prior experience to this other than minor uses of Adobe Flash and AfterEffects. Thus, a lot of self learning was used to complete this individual project. Illustrator was used to create the graphics and to organize them in separate layers in order to properly animate them in AfterEffects.

 

The original idea was to have it be more of a kinetic typography video. However, reading the copy, I did not feel that the personality of the copy afforded much flexibility for a kinetic typography based video. Thus, the typography are quite general and relied on other graphics to add personality into it.

 

The graphics had gone through several iterations in order to best reflect the copy. In general, I was trying to create graphics that could symbolize the copy. However, the first iteration was too off-brand thus the next few iterations needed to be more brand compliant. The third iterations took graphics from an existing SAP Predictive Analytics animation as it was thought that the one that I was working on should be relatable. However, many of those did not reflect the copy properly and seemed to show a laborious workflow. Moving forward, a more modern look was wanted which affected the graphics such as the machinery. Throughout this, how to animate and how to transition between scenes was always considered which also affected the graphics. For example, a transitional concept was to have a conveyor belt connect each scene like a factory. However this was not doable as the graphics kept changing and did not afford such a depiction which is why morphism was incorporated.

 

Incorporating the feedbacks were sometime tedious as I would have to essentially reanimate the entire scene. For example, getting the timing right for readability was difficult. At first it was too fast and then a formula was used to calculate the appropriate average time for reading. However, it was said to be too slow. As a simple solution to this instead of editing each animation individual, as was done previously, I simply sped up the playtime.

Compiling the animation was easy since I made each scene its own composition. Thus, I only had to ensure that the scenes matchup and that the transitions are flawless.