AfterEffects Project: In Your Head

For our AfterEffects animation project, Beste Saylar and I came up with a story reflecting on the people of New York City. Meant to be a commentary on the lack of shared experiences in public spaces, specifically inside crowded subway cars, we illustrate people lost in their own world of thoughts and desires. We also wanted to play with the concept of perspective by heavily moving the camera on the z-axis and creating depth in the scenes. By overlaying abstracted character animations on top of photorealistic background of the subway, we allow the viewers to identify closely with the characters while immersing themselves into the environment of the scene.

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Storyboard

Process

After coming up with the storyline, we jumped right into creating our assets. For each of our characters, we started off by creating paper cut-outs of their body parts, as shown below. Then, in Photoshop, we colored the shapes and organized the layers into assets that could be animated in AfterEffects. For our photorealistic environment, we went out to the Jay Street subway station to film the footage of a subway coming in. We then found the subway seat background photo online.

In AfterEffects, we first animated the movements for each of the characters and then moved on to animate the camera and lighting for each of the scenes. For the intro sequence, I used Premiere to mask out the window of the subway car and key in the animated scene instead. It took us several iterations to reach the final cut to make sure our point could get across clearly using zoom-in transitions and sound effects. Overall, it was a wonderful learning experience for me.