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Installation visualization
Role:
Animator, animation consultant
Platforms:
After Effects, Illustrator, Unreal Engine
I think my favorite challenge in this project was the development of a neon sign-like flicker system that would not require keyframing. There was anything between 30 and 80 layers in any given comp that required flicker effects, so keyframes would not only be excessively time consuming but also any future notes would be prohibitively burdensome.
So I spent a little time developing about five expression systems that I could simply copy and paste across all layers that required the effect. Some expressions reference layer in/out times to trigger fades textured with randomness, Others used keyframe ranges to set specific intervals and cues, and some were designed for intermittent randomness only.
Pepsi activation:
Excalibur food court
This brand activation was designed to play on a tunnel made with parallel mirror LED walls. The animation design combined styles that evokes old school neon signage animation techniques, with smooth interpolation across the surface of the installation.
Agency supplied iconography was deconstructed and given individual animated attitudes. Individual scenes and moments were constructed from them based on a series of iterations with the client, until their desired complexity and style was achieved.
The mirror surface was taken into consideration while arranging individual compositions to enhance the infinity-mirror effect; sometimes matching motion or inhabiting each other's negative space.
Probably the silliest of them all was an expression that flickered during a layer's in/out transitions, and ALSO flickered at a random interval excluding intro or outro ranges. It ended up being an 8 line function with 6 variables, which was far too inefficient to be used on a typical 80 layer comp.
But it certainly looks cool.
In the end, the expression system I utilized the most was also the most elegant.
A simple ternary operator that uses two logical statements to check if the opacity is between 0 and 100, after which per-frame randomness would be applied:
value<100 && value>0?value+random(-30,30):value
This expression requires keyframes, but it was the best balance between efficiency and animation access.
With the other random expressions pasted strategically I was able to use it on whatever icons needed direct intervention while only marginally increasing my per-frame render times.
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