Case Study - Animated character loops
How it can phones and technology make us feel so good, and then so bad at the same time. The contrast is purposefully sharp between the colorful bright lights to look at from inside the phone to the tranquility and peacefulness everything outside of it possesses. Is this paradise, or is this chaos?
Our phones are always on us, and the majority of people look at their phones more than anything else in a day. I struggle with it constantly myself. How could I not? Its this little computer in our pocket that has access to look at or learn basically anything we can think of. We can create, but mostly we just consume. The apps are designed to be addictive, designed to take our time.
The thinking behind why the light coming from the phone is fast is its pretty to look at, and it can take over our attention completely. It can leave us unaware of our surroundings. The outside of the phone light in the peace is minimal, peaceful, and full of little content animals perfectly happy to be present. Its hard to find balance with both the digital addiction and the rest of the real world.
Our phones are always on us, and the majority of people look at their phones more than anything else in a day. I struggle with it constantly myself. How could I not? Its this little computer in our pocket that has access to look at or learn basically anything we can think of. We can create, but mostly we just consume. The apps are designed to be addictive, designed to take our time.
The thinking behind why the light coming from the phone is fast is its pretty to look at, and it can take over our attention completely. It can leave us unaware of our surroundings. The outside of the phone light in the peace is minimal, peaceful, and full of little content animals perfectly happy to be present. Its hard to find balance with both the digital addiction and the rest of the real world.
The original illustration of this idea was made during inktober 2020. Thumbnail sketches of main contrasts for the two sister pieces.
This is a break down of some of the layering for the phone light. The phone lights animated texture on the border was made following Alex Deaton’s (@alx_dtn) tutorial on the animated brush. Once I had one made, the rest were duplicated and adjusted between scale, rotation, blending mode, and transparency. The beams of light were then all parented to the phone movements.
I exported each animal with the puppet tool handles to show the animated character movements. Character animation was done in After Effects using both PuppetTools and Duik.