Journey Through the Landscape of AE Code

For my final project I decided to create a bigger piece which would consist of some tests I created throughout the course and some additional elements which I created specifically for this final project to unify the whole thing.

To begin with, I created a long rectangle where I started to lock in some blocks to set a rough composition of the piece.

The idea of the final video was to slowly pan through this abstract landscape of shapes. Every shape would stand as a separate piece showcasing code driven animation.

After setting up these blocks I could start filling them in with my visual experiments. Here are some of these experiments from up close:

While playing around with these experiments I really understood how powerful expressions can be in generating complex designs. You should have a quite clear idea of what you’re trying to make, it takes a little bit more time to prepare and link everything together, but when it’s done you can really feel the difference. It is so much easier to control everything and make adjustments.

With all of these experiments I tried to maintain a similar grungy aesthetic and visual feeling, which was inspired by the works of Kasia Bojanowska. Figuring out how to achieve a similar look in After Effects was another challenge of its own.

When all the separate pieces were finished the final composition turned into something that looked like this:

Of course it would be a very heavy composition to work on and render at once, but that’s where the tip about proxies saved me!

With some final tweaks and added music, here is the final piece:

Big thanks to Desmond for the effort of putting all this precious knowledge together into one course and showing the power of expressions.This has definitely helped me to strengthen my motion design skills, I’m sure I’m gonna use these lessons in future projects!