The first two weeks of the creative academy have been a mix of exciting and exhausting. I have really been enjoying everything so far. Everyone from teachers to staff and the other students have been so friendly and talented. Already I feel myself growing as a designer and see how my ways of thinking are being challenged and molded.
It was hard to find a way that expressed everything that has happened so far, but I eventually took inspiration from Paolo Tossolini’s presentation and work with AR/VR mapping projects that allow users to experience far away places in three dimensions from devices like their phone.
I used After Effects to create the above looping GIF where the view dives deeper and deeper into each subsequent image. It turned out to be a much more challenging project than I had anticipated.
The main issue I ran into was in making the last image zoom back into the first original image. I ended up with something that feels imperfect. I originally thought I would be able to use pre-compositions to simplify my workspace and process, but realized that in doing so I removed the parent objects and associated keyframes that would allow everything to scale together.
My next major challenge came with getting everything to scale together properly. Because the original image is still visible as the view begins to zoom into the next image, I had to create very complicated groups of objects parented to one another so that an image was influenced by the images that came before and after it.
A few days after finishing the animation I thought of a potential solution that might address the issues I had with this project. By merging my initial idea of using pre-compositions with the method I ended up using of complicated parenting stacks, I will hopefully produce a result that I am ultimately happier with.