Discover You
The Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award is a youth awards program founded in the UK in 1956 by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. The award recognizes adolescents and young adults for completing a series of self-improvement exercises. There are around 300000 participants annually across 144 nations and the program involves more than 1800 organisations across UK- schools.
Challenge
Create a video that would inspire young generations to get involved with the Duke of Edinburgh's Award program.
Approach
The biggest riddle from the start was the ribbon, how to make a completely flat, two - dimensional ribbon appear like it's animating through a faux 3D space, going in front and behind the paralaxing elements.
I decided not to venture into the realm of real 3D, as potentially it would have over complicated things. I stayed true to the nature of the illustrations and kept it all two - dimensional. Although, as I later found out, it took a lot of clever trickery and After Effects magic to make it all come together.
First I rigged the different colors of the ribbon to sliders using Joysticks & Sliders, I was then able to animate them from the master composition and time the speed of every individual color to the camera. Camera animation itself was a totally different beast I had to conquer. Since the ribbon is flat, but other elements are actually in After Effects so called 2.5D, a faux 3D, I had to match the movement of the camera to the perceived shape of the ribbon. That alone would have been fine, I used some clever expressions to help me to smooth out, sometimes erratic, camera motion, and that was done! However then came the slow motion idea, where the animation suddenly slows down, accentuates a certain scene and then picks up again. That was way more tricky to execute than it actually sounds, luckily Duik was there, I've used Duik's Morpher tool, to map the current camera animation on to a slider and used it to easily remap the speed without changing the actual animation.
First I rigged the different colors of the ribbon to sliders using Joysticks & Sliders, I was then able to animate them from the master composition and time the speed of every individual color to the camera. Camera animation itself was a totally different beast I had to conquer. Since the ribbon is flat, but other elements are actually in After Effects so called 2.5D, a faux 3D, I had to match the movement of the camera to the perceived shape of the ribbon. That alone would have been fine, I used some clever expressions to help me to smooth out, sometimes erratic, camera motion, and that was done! However then came the slow motion idea, where the animation suddenly slows down, accentuates a certain scene and then picks up again. That was way more tricky to execute than it actually sounds, luckily Duik was there, I've used Duik's Morpher tool, to map the current camera animation on to a slider and used it to easily remap the speed without changing the actual animation.
The animation was created while working for Nucco Brain studio in London.