ADOBE AFTER EFFECTS TASK
Natural Motion Study
In this task, we need to create a motion graphic animation of a growing plant or plants while incorporating a sense of storyline in it. The duration for this motion graphic video can be up to 10 to 15 seconds.
The plant that I chose is a bean sprout. The reason I chose bean sprout is that I remember doing some experiments on growing this plant during my primary school for a project and it was done successfully! Definitely it was fun and easy to do.
In the video animation that I have created, I decided to make the bean sprout to grow fully, showing its final form and so the time period of this bean sprout growing process can take to 6 days. I have done the motion graphic video by applying a time-lapse style of animation. Another reason why I chose bean sprout is that it is a petite plant that is relatively easy to draw digitally in the form of flat vectors.
THE INSPIRATION
Bean sprout is easy to grow, just let it simply sit on richly wet cotton and wait. On the plus side, it can grow pretty fast which only takes less than a week and even 3 days to see the partial initial growth of its little soft leaf and stem. Below is an example of how bean sprouts grow within the 3 days period.
Time-lapse of growing bean sprouts in 3 days
YouTube video credit to owner
The inspiration for my story flow came from a movie called "Monster University", the snail monster to be exact. There is a scene where the snail monster was trying his best to come to his first day of university class but end up arriving at it at the very end of the university year. This scene particularly gave me an idea for my motion graphic video animation storyline.
Flow story inspiration for my video animation
YouTube video credit to owner
THE DEVELOPMENT
I have developed the video animation entirely using Adobe After Effects. All the illustrations and animations were drawn and animated through the use of the After Effects' functions, settings, keys, etc. Once I have done with the illustrations and animations, I exported it into an AVI format but then converted it into a MPEG-4 file.
I also have added a music background as well as some sounds for the animation. Below is the screenshot for the creation of motion graphic video animation using After Effects.
Developing the video animation using After Effects
THE FINAL RESULT
The title for my short animation video is "Reaching for a bite!". Now, in this video animation, I made a snail trying his best to reach for the bean sprout because he wanted to eat it. He wanted to eat the bean sprout but it took him around 6 days to reach it. During these 6 days, the bean sprout was growing healthily as it grows taller throughout those time periods.
Unfortunately, once the snail reached his destination and had his eyes on the plant, something happened that made him shook. Below is the video animation for it.
Final result for my motion graphic animation video
Music and sounds are from freesound.org
