A short explainer video used during the “In Your Circle” week of the Live Sent message series. Produced while under the employment of Suncrest Christian Church.
For the “In Your Circle” week of the Live Sent series, the goal was to help people realize there are plenty of circles in their lives already, they just might not realize them. Instead of telling people to go do radical things that they may never wind up doing, we wanted to remind people that they already have circles in their lives they can reach out to without having to make any drastic changes, but still make an impact. The In your Circle video, was used to help summarize the message in a clear and understandable way.
This project was made 100% in Adobe After Effects.
Lessons Along the Way
This project turned out to be much more than I had originally anticipated. When I first mentioned the idea in a creative planning meeting, I could see the end result, but when I started working on the project, it turned out to be a pretty large undertaking.
Ideally, a project like this would take place in a team environment where someone would do the illustration (in this case making the little icons), someone else would help craft the script/story, another person would work on the actual animation process, and someone would help record, edit, and mix the audio. For this video, I was that team! It did allow me to work in a way that I felt most comfortable.
For the illustration, I did all of the icon design in After Effects. Typically, the icon creation would be done in Illustrator and then imported into After Effects, but since I was doing things my way, I decided to make all of the icons from scratch in After Effects (cause I just really love working in AE).
Techniques & Principles of Design
1. Find a good place to get good audio. This depends on budget and variety, but knowing a good site and getting comfortable with navigating it, can save you a ton of time. I used a file from audio jungle this on this project which really helped me find some good music at a very reasonable price point.
2. Audio impacts animation. I really wanted the actual animation of this video to help drive the story. So, for the audio, instead of mixing the music and voiceover in an external DAW, I made each phrase it’s own clip and pulled each clip into After Effects so I could space out the audio with the visuals in the animation phase. I felt this technique really helped make things flow a lot better.
3. A good script changes everything. I would argue that the script is the most important aspect of a good video, and the foundation of the story. In this project, it not only helped me tell a good story, but it also helped me plan different phases of the project. Having the script done first let me know about how long the video would need to be, what visual elements would need to be made to help tell the story, and it kept me on track of the initial vision of the video. I wouldn’t hesitate to say the script is the reason why this video was as effective as it was.