Project Breakdown

2D animation is something that I was wanting to get into and experiment with, as it’s a big part of the culture of explainer videos that both brands and individuals post on social media. I watched and followed along to a few tutorials on YouTube which explain how to correctly order the layers of a vector image inside Illustrator and then animate them inside of After Effects. After I had completed a few of these tutorials, I had the confidence to do a full video on my own. I had a good idea to create a 2D animation explainer type video introducing myself and showcasing my skills as an editor.

The first thing I wanted to do was create a script of what to say, as I wanted to do a voiceover to make it seem more authentic. This didn’t take long to do, as I had a few talking points in my head already so getting it written down was not too difficult. After this, I recorded the voiceover. This was a bit harder, as I’m not comfortable with the sound of my voice on a recording, so getting it to sound right was difficult and required a lot of takes. I finally had a couple of takes which I was happy with, and put them together to make a final vocal take. I also wanted to add some background music. For this, I wanted to choose a song that I truly love, and went with the instrumental version of Gravity by Martin Garrix. I simply looped a few seconds of the instrumental which plays continuously throughout the video, and it works well as background music.

Now that the audio was finished, it was time to do some of the video work. I decided to do the text before any of the 2D animations, as I thought it would be easier to do the animation and fit it around the text. I used a similar technique for the text as I have done previously for my lyric videos – using trial and error to time each word of the text to the voiceover. As I was used to doing this, the process didn’t take long. I also animated some of the text a little bit by adding in a position and opacity animation to make the text transition in from either the top or bottom of the screen. One last thing I did for the text was give it multiple colours. I decided to go with white and green for this, and made half or even most of the appearing words white, with the remaining words in green. I planned to continue this trend with the vector images.

I had already gone over my script and highlighted the parts where I wanted a vector image animation to appear, and already had ideas for what I sort of images I could use. I went to a website that provides free vector images (https://www.freepik.com), and started browsing for different images. I wanted all the images to be a 2D cartoon all in a similar style to each other, which was tough to find as lots of the designs are made by different visual artists so naturally styles will be different. I used a couple of other websites too and eventually I had enough images. Some of the images I used included a graduation hat, a person editing at a computer, a group of people, and a man working on a laptop. I also downloaded a vector image of a brown haired man which I thought somewhat resembled myself. I had the idea to animate the mouth in sync with the voiceover, so the video would feature a cartoon version of me talking to the camera.

My next task was to recolour each of the vectors, which took a while as a lot of the images had multiple elements that all needed recolouring individually. Each image had an accent colour whether that be red, purple or blue, etc. I changed the accent colour of each image to the same exact shade of green. After this was complete it was time to animate all the different vector images.

Most of the animations I decided to go for were simple – such as animating the size and opacity to create a growing transition, this worked well for a lot of my images. However, the animation of the man’s mouth moving was a bit more complicated. I had to find the two layers for the two lips and animate the position of them at the correct speed, which took some trial and error, but I made it work. On top of the vector image animations, I created a couple of extra text animations – for example, I made I an animation of the follower number quickly counting up, showing that my input can help a brand grow on social media.

The last thing I wanted to do was add a few videos at the end to show a bit of my personality and my interests. I mentioned that for the song I used as background music, I looped part of the instrumental. Near the end of the video, I removed this loop and replaced it with the normal song playing, with the melody of the song starting as the voiceover finishes. I took several videos from my phone and timed them to appear with each note of the melody, which works very well. I accompanied this with a green accent colour next to each video to keep the branding consistent.