Amos Rex - An animation story
Bonkers. Just, bonkers.
It's not every day an animator calls you up from across the room to ask if you can recreate a certain animation. It turns out that, while a reference animation already existed on the web, creating the same animation in Adobe After Effects was a cause for much lamentation. It wasn't just hard, it was impossible!
I had nothing to do with the initial design of the animation, the website, or any part of the project... Except for this one small thing.
So what do I do? I check out the reference animation from the web, find out that it's using PixiJS with a certain shockwave filter. The initial setup is easy enough, but scaling and laying it out for 16:9 and later 9:16 aspect ratios necessitated copious amounts of tweaking until the designers were sated.
Of course, rendering it in a browser is only half the battle. The final step is for me to record the animation using OBS on a 4K screen at 100% scaling - the last part was necessary because of some kind of bug at other scaling levels. This on a GTX 1050, because this was during the first crypto boom when nothing with any real oomf was either available or available at anything close to MSRP. To make sure no hitches were observable in the final recording, everything from Figma and extra Chrome tabs to Docker was shut down. The final result was an mp4 container using the h264 codec that was shipped off to the animator for further editing.
The not-quite-never-ending story
The most surprising thing is how well it worked and how long it kept going. For years, it was my Rube Goldberg-esque recordings that showed up on animated and static billboards all over town as well as projectors inside the installation.
The projectors were in of themselves quite cool. A side effect of projectors using light emission to blast lumens at a surface is that, if you make the background your content black, it will appear to be more or less transparent on the projection surface. The result is projectors mounted in the ceiling that projecting signage (after bouncing the light off a mirror) that look almost magical as almost out of thin air a bubbly shockwave animation would appear out of almost nothing.
All Good Things...
Eventually, the client wanted to produce the animation themselves. Naturally, everyone thought that we had After Effects files somewhere. At that time we no longer had the same animator working for us, so some humans even showed up at the office to look through a relevant folder for the right files. A machine was set up with the relevant folder available from the desktop. Nothing of interest was found.
Eventually someone asked me how we had made the animations, and it was with a mixture of embarrassment and pride that I replied: "I made them. Well, I recorded them on my machine, and sent them to the animator."
Inquiries were made as to whether or not the client would be able to use the same system as I had. I advised against teaching the client the ways of Gulp, NVM, OBS, rendering and recording performance.
Eventually, after some back and forth, an animator managed to recreate the effect in After Effects. But for a good long while, I found it hilarious that I had a part in producing these things.
