Featured Student Work: Erin Anderson

Another installment of featured student work. This time it is Erin Anderson’s exercise for the motion graphics class. The short exercise asked students to explore the theme “it all started the day that the real world met the land of make-believe.”

Untitled from Erin Anderson on Vimeo.

Describe a little bit of your thought process in addressing the project brief, why this solution?
I was looking through the videos at archive.org trying to come up with a solid idea. They had some wartime videos that I was watching and I started to think what it might look like if an atomic bomb was a happy experience rather than a horrific one.

Describe a little bit of you working process.
I’m pretty new to AfterEffects so I occasionally had to look up some things that we had already learned in class just to remember how to do them! I also had this weird problem where I got white squares in my final rendered movie. I looked it up all over the web but I couldn’t find anything. When I got to class, Ryan explained that if you have preview view selected on an effect, it gives you that little square with your effect in it and if you don’t change it to the final view, it’ll render in your final one. Weird. I used a LOT of parenting too!

What are some of your inspirations for your solution?
Hmm, I would say most of it was actually the things that we learned in class. While we’re in demos, I sometimes have an idea of what can be done with what we’re learning. I stumbled on the work of Carolina Melis through Motionographer and I really really love her work.

What did you gain from this experience?
I definitely have a better understanding of motion tracking and parenting. I also had of fun trying to get the new things to blend into the old with effects and playing around with those for the first time. Obviously there’s a little bit of work to do in that area, but I feel like I learned a lot in this exercise.

Anything else you would like to add.
Motion is a learning process for sure, but I had a lot of fun working on this project!