Assignment: Create a 1-2 minute animation using After Effects with a partner
Idea and process: Ruiqi and I got to know each other during the process of this project and began our ideation process by watching a bunch of videos. Our styles were similar; most of the references were absurd music videos with mixed live action and trippy visualizations.
We started to riff on the idea of watching a character slowly break down and begin hallucinating in an otherwise ordinary setting, culminating in the character floating through a void of some kind. We storyboarded on paper and created 6 scenes that took our character through a grocery store. We also listened to some music with dark basslines— Hive by Earl Sweatshirt was a particularly helpful reference— to get a sense of the kind of music we could cut to. Riqui found this video; once we heard the voices of the interviewee and interviewer, we knew we wanted to sample lines of this interview in the music.
After putting together a storyboard, I made a simple beat and Ruiqi put together assets of the grocery store and an animation of a fruit bursting into a particle cloud of flies. With these building blocks, we began animating our piece scene by scene, adding to the music and refining the animations as we went.
Thanksgiving break fell right in the middle of the assignment period; we finished half of the animation before break and did the rest in the days before the assignment was due. Ultimately, even though we compressed our work into a short period of time, we stayed quite close to our storyboard and did not need to cut out a whole lot. Both of us were on the same page the whole time— pretty remarkably smooth for a collaboration— and happy with the final result.