Alien Animation

Originally worked on with a team of four, I continued to revise and remake the sections that I had less of a part in after the conclusion of the project. I was in charge of most of the storyboard, sound editing, some asset creation, and much of the afterEffects animation.

Planning

We chose to use vector illustrations because much of our planned animation would use text and infographic visuals. In terms color and form, we decided that humans were to be represented by warmer colors and geometric shapes, while aliens were to have a green-blue palette with organic designs.

When storyboarding, we wanted cohesive transitions and dynamic compositions. An interesting point in the process was using the rotation like parenthesis, where we start off in current times, rotate into an aside about aliens, then rotate back to the future.

First Revision

I liked the basic structure of the animation, but had problems with stylistic cohesion between different asset creators, the low contrast of colors, and the roughness of many transitions. Additionally, I wanted to revise the scientist sequence as it was far more static than the rest of the piece.

I first started by updating the background assets so that they had more detail and cohesion. This was followed by the rest of the assets, aside from the handful I had created. The assets that had the largest change were the alien structures, as I redesigned them with a underwater theme. While I did so, I simplified the animation structures and fixed some of the bad transitions.

Second Revision

For my second pass, I solidified a color palette and added gradient shading to assets. For many of the backgrounds, I added more detailed land to avoid flat planes as well as a change from night to day that spans the entire animation.