Say Trees!
These two weeks, we focused mainly on After Effect and Aero to create animations and put them into real-life settings. Our story is about a day of some trees; they visited this concrete jungle, New York, and had some short dialogues with us along the way.
Creation
Starting with the concept, we created a storyboard. This storyboard evolved a lot as the project unfolded. In the beginning, we did not consider real-life settings, so the plot was slightly different. But as we learned about Aero, we changed our story into a bit more interactive piece.
Having the storyboard, we then start drafting our characters in Illustrator and later bringing them into life in After Effect.
Most of the video was done in After Effect, including the animation of trees and texts. Then we place those animated elements in Aero instead of using the 3D camera tracker in AE. However, some assets were more challenging to control than others. So for those parts, we edited them back in after recording in Aero.
To me, if we were to create a pre-recorded video, I think the camera tracker in After Effect performs a lot better than Aero. However, the way Aero can include audience and interactions are also important. Unfortunately, we did not manage to make it into a live, interactive piece this time, but I’d definitely like to try it out in the future!
