Source Material
To start this project I had to base my animation on an old project from a while back. I had to make an infographic about a topic I enjoy and show off a good amount of data while also looking visually appealing. I chose to do mine on Dungeons and Dragons, a game I’ve been super interested in for a while. My first stab at the assignment was to try and fit the design into a normal character sheet and alter it to fit all the data and charts I wanted to include, as well as using a weathered paper look for the background. Now this design is far from my best work, and I was not very happy looking back at it, so I decided to start from scratch with a brand new style. Taking to YouTube to get inspiration and find something I could try and do!
First Inspiration
One video I stumbled upon was “Why Video? For Business – Kinetic Text Animation” Which is a video by the Youtube channel Eldraw Media, a smaller channel with around 950 Subscribers at the time of writing this case study. The video was very high quality and used some of the typographic details that I was looking for in an animated infographic.
Sketches!
Sketches are everyone’s favorite part of the project! Just like in other posts, you can click on the images to see them bigger. This process was a little difficult for me due to the fact that I had to go in completely blank and create a nice new style while maintaining the information I had. The next step in this process was storyboarding and scripting for my voiceover and getting closer to figuring out my final product.
Storyboard and Scripting
Storyboarding and scripting were the next steps in the process, it’s good to plan out what you’re doing next while also starting to write out the script for your voiceover. Writing out a script was fairly simple and it mainly consisted of me rambling into a microphone, on a program I’ve used in the past called “Descript” which is an audio recording software that automatically transcribes your speech as you record. It helps a lot for me when I’m working on any script.
Infographic Animatic
Animatics are a fun way of bringing your storyboards to life, they’re very, VERY rough but will show clients a little bit of rough of the final product before you start getting too far into the final product. It is a really great way to showcase an idea with rough animation.
Asset Creation
Asset Creation was what took the longest out of any part of this assignment. Trying to create a bunch of different character designs that could represent each of the 13 classes easily was definitely a challenge, especially when trying to keep them simple and in a consistent art style in Illustrator. After a couple of days of working on it, and getting them to a place where I was happy with it all, I was able to head into After Effects and do my magic! (Pun intended) I’m very proud of what I was able to put together for these little characters.
The Final Product
The end result is always something I look forward to and this project was the same, I was ecstatic to see the project come to a close and see my hard work fully rendered! I’m very proud of this project and I hope to do more in a similar style, it was a lot of fun!