Animation: Brandon Laine

Design/Art Direction: Shannon Torphy

Creative Direction: Andrea Nordgren

Producer: Andy Borgione

Agency: A.O.R. (Agency Off Record)

I started this project by creating a rough animatic from the design boards in order to get the timing of the voiceover down and the overall direction of the movements. At this early stage, I try to delay opening the actual illustrator files and just work with screenshots with each of the boards in order to move quickly. Blocking out the general movements before getting into the nitty gritty of layers is extremely helpful when the large amount of assets come in later on.

This project utilized a lot of hand-drawn elements, which I created in Adobe Animate. I animated these frames on twos and started with key poses of one - the storyboard, and two - the shape that I wanted the storyboard to transform into.

I then took these sketches into After effects and used shape layer masks to trace over them. This project was on a tight schedule so I figured that this strategy would give me the most flexibility later on if I needed to change the stroke, fill, inner shadow etc.

For the book that opens and has the map inside, I used Cinema 4D to get the page motion correct. I created the map animation so that it was timed out correctly, and then I applied that animation as a texture to a couple of square objects in C4D. I animated the objects with bend deformers and only used the luminance channel in the textures so that it would blend in with all of the other 2D elements in after effects..

Once I finished animating all of the main elements, I added hand drawn accents and shadows to everything using a combination of Adobe Animate and alpha masks in after effects. I found that 5 frames of moving texture was a good amount to loop and repeat on each of the objects.