‘Bubble’ Process - Personal Project
The initial idea for Bubble was doing what I do best and what I did over all my college notes— drawing weird faces.
The piece was designed specifically for the introduction of my newest reel, so I wanted the face to be revealed from below as the camera drops away from the reel title.
I was inspired by the Great Fairy fountains in Legend of Zelda - Majora’s Mask (one of the greatest games ever). I pictured this woman to be a type of statue or spirit living beneath the water in her lair. So working backwards, I decided that a bubble encapsulating a special hero would be the best way to lead the viewer to our ancient underwater goddess.
Since I was freelancing full time while beginning this project, I gave myself a ton of time to flesh it out and experiment with it. The process involved a lot of experimentation to find something that made me feel good about it. Which is usually what I do when having the privilege of no time limit on a personal project.
The butterfly was much easier to rig up using Cinema4d than After Effects. I painted some textures to project on it’s wings in Photoshop. Then I placed an sphere around the butterfly to catch reflections in a way that was believable. The design of the butterfly went through multiple color experiments before landing on the end result. But at this stage I was still working in greyscale just to focus on values and animation first.
I was originally pretty set on having the underwater goddess be framed this closely to camera. And while I love that it shows off her details, as well as makes her feel ‘grand’ in the scene, ultimately I had to come up with a path to add more depth to the scene. Without an environment surrounding her, not only did it lack depth, but it lacked context for the bubbles floating around.
After sketching in Photoshop (left), I had a better idea of how I wanted to execute the scene in AE. I did lose a sense of the goddess being front and center, but I really became infatuated with the environment she was living in now, and it felt much more “underwater” rather than floating through space.
I wanted to avoid using the classic ‘Wave Warp’ for the hair, so I used a cloth belt simulation in Cinema4d to create a more believable effect for her hair.
Most of the bubbles are animated individually, but I used an emitter in Cinema4d to fill in some background bubbles as well as some smaller moments.