The story of this animation began at 4 in the morning this past Wednesday. It had been a sleepless night, and I was exhausted. Just lying in bed and pretending to be asleep wasn’t working in the way it normally did, so I decided to at least try to be somewhat productive with my time. I convinced myself that a moderately creative method of stacking layers could produce the same effect as dozens of masks, so I conceived an animation that would take dozens of masks to pull off- a few strands of yarn weaving themselves together. The plan ultimately failed, either because my plan was misguided or sleep deprivation. But since I had nothing better to be doing, I started masking away.
After a few hours of insomnolent masking, I ended up with a very boring animation. It was slow, uninteresting, and colored like a 90's era Taco Bell. I tried playing around with new color pallets and background textures, but nothing sold the animation. That’s when I decided to add a second area of visual interest-- if the strings both tangled and untangled themselves. This animation alone can still be seen in the center of the frame.
The real exciting part came from my sister’s feedback to reduce the area in the center. I attempted to find a distortion tool within After Effects that would allow me to squish in the area in an hourglass figure, but I found the much more interest “CC Mirror” before that tool. I crafted a circle with the original animation and watched it for about an hour. I’m not certain if it was sleep deprivation or an actual optical illusion, but the single frames of the animation still have the illusion of movement when stalled. My Mom suggested that I animate the pieces of the circle in and out, so I found a cool moment in the transition to frame the single piece of animation, then animated the circle in and out.
Normally it takes me a couple of days to like an animation of mine. It takes time to get used to and a lot of external positive feedback before I’ll start warming up to a project. This is probably the first motion graphic I’m releasing already pleased with. I’m certain I’ll find some things to change in a few days, but for now, this carries my seal of approval.
