Mirai (excerpt)

Client

Sparky Film

Year

2023

Design and Animation

Dexter

Production

Sparky Film

Animation Time

40 Hours (5 days)

This graphics pack was part of a big multinational’s internal training programme graduation film, a celebration for the participants. All we had to go on in terms of branding for the training programme was a head graphic (see below,) so I dove into the multinational’s brand guidelines and decided to use their secondary colour palette to give life to the graphics.

Mercifully, for timings, a voice-over had already been recorded. A music track had also been chosen.

For me, music is so important. A music track is one of the first things I ask or look for. It sets the tone, and it helps me in designing animations. Music plays such a vital part in a viewer’s experience. Unfortunately, it’s frequently an afterthought!

My workflow since 2020, in all animations, is to create a Premiere Pro project, import the music and any voiceover, and use Adobe’s genius Dynamic Link. The feedback in doing it this way is almost instant. You can see the flow of a piece of work much easier than doing RAM previews.

Background Animation

The first thing any self-respecting motion designer will ask for when tasked with animating a still frame graphic is the original layered file. Sod’s Law dictates that the end client doesn’t have such a file, and you will be stuck with the relatively low-resolution image you extracted from a PowerPoint. As did I, you’ll despair for about five minutes and then get to work.

My solution was to overlay extra animated elements over the still frame, slap on an energy grid stock video, and then add a subtle camera push-in. Voila. An animated still frame.

Those line elements formed the basis for the rest of the animation.

Plug-ins, Plug-ins, Scripts

Any self-respecting motion designer will have a respectable set of plugins and scripts, and I’m no different. I even used one of my scripts (Dex’s Power Grid) to create the grid sequence.

Ever since COVID, for some reason, I’ve found myself doing a ton of jobs that require an image grid. Image grids are tedious and time-consuming to set up and amend. It took me about a day to figure out the logic to create a dynamic grid and two weeks to write the Javascript code to automate the process. It’s an absolute time saver, though I do say so myself.