2D SFX personal project
Recently I have been re-thinking what I would like my career to be. I have always branded myself as a graphic designer and had jobs accordingly. I have worked at a packaging design company where my main job was desktop publishing and creating content for the socials. In my spare time however I found myself drawing, painting and animating more game and classic RPG related things. Games and animation have always been a big hobby of mine and I would love to start making steps to include those in my career path.
Thus I set out and gave myself an assignment. My first step, to also further my experience in animation was to get familiar with Adobe After Effects and get to know its particle system. I knew I wanted it to feel magical but also nostalgic, so I quite quickly settled on magical summoning circles. Below is a little bit of my recorded progress beneath the video! Enjoy!
Early concept sketch of a storyboard for the animation. In the final result I have omitted the book.
I needed a sword to be summoned so I had to design one! Below my inspiration (+ one of my own, spot the sketch!) and in the image below that a snippet of how the design came to be. Since my main focus was particles and after effects I did not want to spend too much of my energy on the designing of the sword but it was nontheless valuable to go through the design process for it, albeit short!
Sketches on top, adding slight variation and detail below!
I started animating the circles. I finished these nearly completely before I settled on how exactly I wanted the sword to appear. Below I explored three options made in Photoshop. The first is the sword slowly sliding up from the portal, particles gathering in the opposite direction to create contrast.
For the second option I wanted the sword to appear already on top of the summoning circle, the particles would slowly gather and concentrate forming the sword.
The third option, marked with a 2 is actually the second step in the summoning. After the light particles have formed I wanted them to explode and fully reveal the sword and its details. The difficulty here was to also make sure the particles would reflect on the sword in After Effects.
And that was it! The project with process. There is no audio as that was not my focus for this project. But perhaps in the future this is something I could explore. If you made it this far I want to say thank you for watching!
