A brand promo for a soda aimed at designers. Within the 3D design and animation, I exploited the broken artifacts of the design process.
C4D, After Effects · 6 weeks · about 53 espressos
This project was an opportunity experiment, taking things that should never make it into the final product and utilize them as assets. I made this promo as an ode to the frustrations that designers endure and the many issues one might encounter in any given piece of work.
Design software is known to be finicky. As someone who does a lot of 3D work without a powerful computer, crashing renders are an all too familiar reality. Skipped frames and half rendered images are something that somehow weasel their way into my projects. I used these broken frames as the transition point between scenes within the piece. This is because they are symbolic of the feelings I experience when I see a corrupted asset or missing file, it tempts me to abandon or switch up the direction I'm going.
I must have stared at this two second clip for almost three hours, making micro adjustment after micro adjustment. I wanted to capture the process of trying things, seeing things in different ways, and seemingly never finding the version that is just right. I played clips in reverse, repeated them, and made color adjustments within the animation to emulate the feeling of scrubbing through a video timeline over and over.
TRICKS AND TOOLS
OF THE TRADE
We tend to either overuse or forget about the tools we're given. I, for instance, am guilty of forgetting I've set up color swatches, or trying too vigorously to stick to a composition structure. To solidify the concept, I wanted to include imagery of such things. The perfect ratio, rule of thirds, lorem ipsum, and color swatches all make an appearance throughout the motion, but are immediately disregarded as they fly in and out of the screen only to be replaced by more exciting visuals.
Drink caffeine, create, caffeine crash, repeat...
FRAMES
The style was experimental in nature with glitchy effects to allude to the frustrating bugs of being a creative. Trying new things, failing, then redoing what works. We can feel held back by a variety of factors, but personally I can't help but feel as though we can embrace these constraints as new means of creation.
