This is a quick animation of my own name that I created as an art test for a prospective client. The prompt was simply to animate my own name in a creative way, with the challenge being that it was due the next day.
This took a couple hours to figure out a concept, write a small text based storyboard based on the beats of this track, and animate it.
I started out with finding a nice piece of stock music that wouldn't drive me crazy to listen to over and over again. I don't always get to start with the music, it often gets added once there's already voiceover and a near-final first draft, but getting to start with music meant I could animate to the beat.
Personally, I got into animation and motion graphics because I really admired animated music videos when I was younger! It's something I really like to play with, given the opportunity. That said, it can take a while to find the right stock music, and then to find the right cut of it can take even longer. Normally, I just do a basic cut in After Effects directly so I can get a good base of where the music needs to be, but then I usually bring it over to Audition to mix VO and sound effects in.
For fun, this was the small text-based storyboard I came up with:
Normally, I would either sketch a small storyboard or even create a full one with near-final graphics, but due to time constraints (it was due the next day!), the length of this piece (only 10 seconds), and not actually needing to make sure I was on the same page with anyone else, this text-based storyboard worked just fine for my needs.
In much of my work, I've done a lot of that clean, graphic, cartoony, standard motion graphic style, and I wanted to try something a little different this time, focusing more on texture to add complexity. Often, I haven't had the time in other projects to layer on more texture and other subtleties, but because this is a very short animation, even under a tight deadline, I could play with it a bit more.
