The concept for this short animation was idea of transformation. With this work I had the freedom to explore animation methods that usually I wouldn’t consider to use just because I like to have control, I am talking about animation generated by procedural algorithms or randomly generated pattern that somehow are appealing. To be honest I am not familiar with the programming language and i found it terrible boring, however I must say that I think what code can do is amazing, is just that it really don’t have the patience to try to understand it.

Having say that I found out that there are actually a couple of expressions that I am familiar with that can be tweaked to generate really cool stuffs, so here is what I did:

First i wanted to go from micro to macro in the transformation (I probably went too far and to obvious by choosing a microscope POV but the idea is there) and although abstract I was hoping to illustrate the idea of a “music particle” being introduced into a living organism resulting in an orchestrated visual dance stimulated purely by music that with the end of sound the image will die as well.

It is all motion graphics animated in after effects and the technique that I used for this animation is fairly simple, I just created Photoshop composition with layers containing all the objects that I wanted to be animated, for example the cell.

And the interface. (One object to be moved per layer)

Then I made a song that also transforms (or progress) over time to reinforce the feeling of transformation. Then, using after effects I isolated the bass from the high-pitched sounds with an inbuilt plug-in.

Then I started to work with the particle system and here is where it got interestingly randomised (sort of). Using a simple expression I told one of the sounds to drive the emitter of the particles around the canvas (that’s how I got the overall movement), then I created two types of particles groups one that basically lives longer than the other one, I played with some other properties but essentially that is the main difference, when I got a nice offset between those two groups I attached one to the bass of song and the other one to the high-pitched sounds. After that I just had to tweak a little bit some values here and there but I already have a good looking animation with particles and everything responding just to the wave of a song.

The rest was purely aesthetic decisions like colour and background textures, etc.

The interface was animated manually to an extend but again, the procedural animation that I have already produced, serve me as a guide so I just needed to parent things, play with the opacity and that is pretty much it.

Here is the link to the video: http://www.pablander.com/website/video.html