The Gallery

An animated visualisation of Poem No.08 written by the lovely Alaska Gold. I have been following Alaska Gold's poetry for a while now, and having the opportunity to bring one of her best pieces to life was an absolute delight. Being able to bring spoken word to life, has always been one of the driving reasons i pursued to learn animation.

The project was done with both cel and keyframe animation in Adobe Photoshop and After Effects, and also a little bit of Maya animation.

From the start, this project proved to have many challenges. I first struggled to create a design that was simple enough to animate, but also give the poem a complementing illustrative quality. I then needed to put the audio together to help with timing the animation. i sought help from a voice actor and purchased music by Lullatone which matched up with the rhythm of the spoken word.

After choosing a new colour palette, i revised a new design that had less textures and a more simplistic and personality driven design. The initial designs lacked depth of field and also had too much textures to animate.

A few parts of the animation involved animating floating and rotating objects. Getting the perspective right for these objects while maintaining the illustrative design i had chosen required some 3d animation. i first modelled the objects and animated them in Autodesk Maya, and drew and applied textures over the rendered animation frame by frame in Photoshop.