Project 4

For this piece, I chose to use an instrumental version of one of my favorite songs, “Puffin on Zootiez” by one of my favorite artists, Future. While the subject matter and content of the original song itself may not be classroom appropriate, I felt as though the simple melodic tone of the beat itself would work perfectly for this project. I am not familiar with many instruments, but whichever instrument was used in the creation of the simple “dings” throughout this excerpt is, in my opinion, amazing. With the bass and snare in the background juxtaposing the melody, I immediately had the idea of only manipulating the background based on the amplitude of the sound.

As you can see in my wonderfully descriptive storyboard, I only had a hazy idea about what I wanted to do to bring this sound to life. Within this basic outline of my animation, I knew that I wanted to have a moving background to keep the viewers stimulated without making it too busy. I also knew that the main focal point of the piece would be two circles moving along to the melody as described earlier. While most of the elements I originally thought to add do appear in the animation, one of the main parts of my piece was not originally in my plans. When I first began creating the project, for some reason I decided that straying away from my storyboard would be a good place to start. Future Hendrix, a prominent rapper in today’s hip hop scene, is known for almost always wearing sunglasses. Therefore, this was the first manipulation I made to the storyboard. I found this image of the hip hop star,

and used it to create a composition in Illustrator of his trademark sunglasses. As soon as I had the object imported into After Effects, I knew that I wanted the shades to be an integral part of the animation so as to give credit to the creator of the song. In addition to this, I wanted to pull from Future’s purple aesthetic that he is known for. As early as storyboarding, I knew that cooler colors would be beneficial to my animation. Therefore, I looked at a few of his album covers, fan art, and performances for inspiration:

With the obvious emphasis he places on including purple into his looks and creative explorations, it felt only right to continue that into my work. I took the most inspiration from his DS2 album cover, as that is one of the first of his albums that I ever listened to. Without risking losing the purple tones, I was sure to incorporate the blue into the background of the animation and even structured it in the same color configuration as he did on the album cover.

For my first draft, I really focused on just trying to get everything I had on the storyboard into the animation. As mentioned previously, I did not restrict myself to my original plan, but even so I was still sure to use that plan as the backbone of my piece.

I used the “woop woop” sound (that’s how I described it in the storyboard, so I guess I’ll stick with it) as a way to bring the sunglasses into the scene. Aside from that, the animation was not very complex; I still had not grown entirely comfortable with Adobe’s interface. Despite its simplicity, I chose to keep most of the elements of my first draft within my final. The two elements I chose to add reflect my increasing confidence in my After Effects capabilities: the smoke and the second two sunglasses animations. The smoke effect is a personal addition, as I vividly remember the crazy smoke machines at the Future concert I went to, so I still associate that with him. Also, as I have been sure to reiterate, the sunglasses are one of the main aspects of Future’s style that I anted to include For both of these, I followed tutorials that not only showed me how to do this, but provided me with two expert After Effects animators who unintentionally showed me some tips and tricks to navigate the application. Using pre-comps made the organization of my timeline much easier. Also, while they refrained from explaining fully, both men used a bit of code in their videos. As a computer science major, this intrigued me, and led me to do some more research into the terminology and functions that they used. Some of the code, mainly maintaining consistent stroke width, seemed obsolete to me, so I refrained from using them in my final piece. Regardless, I will include links to both tutorials as well as the explanations of the code in my annotated bibliography below.

Code, Clear, dir. 2021. An Introduction to Programming in After Effects. YouTube. YouTube.

This is a 3 hour long tutorial about coding in After Effects. While it went out of the scope of my project and I’m sure many others’ I still found it interesting and helpful, though I have not watched it in its entirety.

Demafiles, Alan. 2020. “After Effects Video Tutorial.” LinkedIn. December 1, 2020.

Professor Dietrick supplied us with this LinkedIn tutorial collection which helped me understand the basics of After Effects.

Demi. n.d. Future Rapper. Pinterest. Pinterest. Accessed November 8, 2022.

Image of Future performing

“Future.” n.d. Rap Wiki. Accessed November 8, 2022.

Source image of Future’s sunglasses

Greene, Jayson. 2019. “Future Hndrxx Presents: The WIZRD.” Pitchfork. Pitchfork. January 24, 2019.

Image of Future’s project “The WIZRD”

Olufemii, dir. 2020. Echo Outline Effect | After Effects Tutorial. YouTube. YouTube.

I found this tutorial to be extremely easy to follow, and it taught me about a bunch of different stroke effects you can use in After Effects. This entire YouTube page is full of random helpful After Effects tutorials that I would highly suggest browsing if you’re stuck looking for some inspiration.

Tuts, Envato, dir. 2019. Create an Atmospheric Smoke Effect in Adobe After Effects. YouTube. YouTube.

Just like the account above, this YouTube page has a vast collection of After Effects tutorials for random effects you may want to use.

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