I love working as a motion graphics designer, but I’d be lying if I said that it doesn’t often feel like work. When it definitely doesn’t feel like work is when I get to do cool stuff for my friends, and that’s the case with this project. My friends in the band Tungston Beach were touring behind a new release and they asked me to create some animations from their existing art (created by the very talented iKainu) to use as stage projections during shows.
I had a few files from the artist, but no Illustrator files. The art was also portrait oriented and these would need to be landscape to make full use of a typical 16x9 projector. That is to say, I had to get creative manipulating the awesome source material. Below are short GIF clips from my favorite series of animations made from cover art for the band’s cassette release of “Flesh”.
ORIGINAL ART BY IKAINU ⬇
Above: Original artwork by iKainu for the album “Flesh” by Tungston Beach.
ANIMATION FOR STAGE SCENIC BY ME ⬇
Clip of Flesh Animation by me. From original artwork by iKainu.
Clip of Weird Things in a Ball Pit Animation by me. From original artwork by iKainu.
Clip of Ball Pit to Flesh Animation by Me. From original artwork by iKainu.
THE PROCESS ⬇
After converting the PNGs to vector art that I could use in Aftereffects, I spread the googley-eyed creatures apart and gave them jiggles to match their worm-like bodies. Of course, I also added some blinks and looking around for those big peepers to add lots of subtle (but still dynamic) movement that appears to move to the music at almost any tempo. All of this had to be done so that the projections could be perfect loops*, which I accomplished by having the very last frame of the video be 100% identical to the very first frame.
*Loops not shown above due to size/length.