Ice Sculptor

This is my final project for School of Motion's course "Animation Bootcamp". The goal was to create a concept and animation for a 35 second video based on styleframes by the amazing studio "Ordinary Folk". Central theme of the piece is an ice sculptor and a chainsaw which are a used as metaphor for us animators to understand how the tool (aka Adobe After Effects) works but most importantly how to create good work with it – "Without the craft, the tool is nothing".

Concept/Animation

Client

School of Motion

Concept/Animation

I started by imagining how this animation could look and feel like. Afterwards I created an animatic with the provided styleframes and the voiceover I chose out of the four different ones we were given. In addition to the voice over later on I also added in sound effects I thought to be fitting. As for the artwork we got these great looking boards with lots of flat shapes, triangles, squares and rectangles. For some of the elements we were given the opportunity to customize and personalize our project by being able to choose between different versions, for example regarding the gender and look of the main character and the bobsled.

I used the shapes from the boards as indicators as for how the art director may have imagined the animation to play out. Some of the frames are implying lots of energy whereas others are more literal. While some of the elements could be used as given other ones had to be rebuilt from scratch in After Effects. I spend quite some time setting everything up for animation and building the hero chainsaw which then I used as pre-comp throughout the piece.

My goal was to keep the animation flowing from start to finish, use clever transitions and apply everything I learned throughout this course. It was an honour bringing these amazing styleframes by Ordinary Folk to life!