A VIKING STORY

Tools

Adobe After Effects
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
Reaper

Skills

Animation
Illustration
Voice-acting
Music Composition
Sound mixing

Specs

Date: May.24.2023
Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Framerate: 24 fps
Runtime: 2m 29s

Descriptive Word project

Project Duration

May 10–24, 2023 (2 weeks)

Project Brief

Animated any word in such of way that the word means.

An epic tale of an army of Vikings setting off to battle and invade the King’s land.

Originally, I was going to choose the word "twist" and have the letters dance with each other—but I ended up doing a full-on war epic short film with a much better word.

Achievements

At this point, despite only having worked with After Effects for only 4 months—I could already see my skills exponentially improving because of my eagerness. For this project, I went ahead and taught myself how to do walk-cycles, months before the actual lesson on it in school.
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My favourite thing about this animation was my interesting songwriting process and the song itself. I took inspiration from one of my favourite bands, Sigur Rós, and sang complete gibberish lyrics (but beautiful sounding). I typed out the plot synopsis and translated it into Icelandic and a few other languages. I then changed some words so that there was a proper amount of rhythm per line.

Challenges

Unfortunately, there was one scene I had to cut short (due to time constraints), but I got a little creative and made that abrupt scene even better. There was a loud positive reaction with the class, so I think the changes I made with that scene was a success!

This also wasn't the first time I had to think quickly due to time constraints. I had to make creative changes with another project, but those changes arguably were the best part of the animation (my favourite part, at least).