KAO Process - Personal Project
Sometimes it’s just fun making propaganda pieces with a chaotic energy, where things are barely threaded together with cohesion!
While the concept itself might be categorized as ‘edgy teenager’, I still just really enjoy making fun stuff about politicians who let us down daily and this is one of my favorite motion styles to create in. The idea was to harbor this hatred but to do so in a way that looked messy and hand-made, yet still packed some energy for the viewer.
How can I make something chaotic and all over the place, while making it ‘feel good’? That was the main driving challenge in putting together this piece.
To keep the chaos throughout, I wanted to avoid using interpolation between keyframes as much as possible, and rely on using hold keyframes to give everything a rougher feel to it. As well as treating a lot of the text with glitching/warping effects for a more wild style. I also wanted the politicians to be like stickers being laid out on to a surface. And even though some of these moments happen very quickly, I wanted certain elements to still lead the viewers’ eyes. As long as I could still lead their eyes and make moments slightly readable, then I figured I could go a bit crazy.
Using the most advanced studio technology known to humans, aka using two box fans and putting an old piece of my desk on top of them in a garage, I was able to do a stop motion(ish) type of technique to create the tape transition at the end. It also served as the background for the piece. I originally thought I would make this in 3d, but why would I do that when this is so much easier?
For the text effect in the beginning, I wanted it to look like the text was being blown through a sub woofer. I originally tried to project the text on a plane in cinema4d (left). I used a formula effector on it and controlled it with a sphere field, but I wasn’t enjoying bouncing back and forth between c4d and after effects to finesse it. So what I ended up doing was using some circle strokes as a displacement map for the ‘caustics’ effect (center). Not only did I like the result better, but it was so much easier to art direct within the composition I was working in. I did of course make the Manchin sticker in 3d, as it was way easier than doing it in AE and made a more believable/controllable result (right).