Mesirow Financial: Season's Greetings 2009

Medallion Sketches

The original idea was supposed to illustrate a tree within an intricate art nouveau type of background. See below. However, during animation tests the intricate animation of the tree became much harder to follow while the text was being animated on the side of the screen.

Allowing the audience "dual focus" always requires a balancing act, so we cut down on the illustrative details so that we could focus more on the concept of growth. The text was much easier to read after that.

Color Test: Maple Sketch

I believe I spent more of my time going back to testing and retesting the right kind of paint software -- over the amount of time I animated this whole project in Flash. I needed to find the right brush tool that conveyed just the type of texture and "accidentals" to get just the right kind of impressionistic feel when painting leaves and textures. This way, I won't get bogged down trying to get too detailed down to the leaf level, and the images will be a lot smoother to animate.

I did the initial sketches using Artrage because the default brush tool handled the dabbing in the leaves perfectly. Then, I did the final prep and color tweaks using Photoshop.

Overview

This is what makes web design so much fun! This is one of those projects that really put all my design experience to the test. It required expertise of at least 4 types of software(vector drawing, illustration, animation, and morphing) to get the job done. In the later stages of animation, it was paramount to understand best practice design architecture in Flash to ensure that the movie doesn't get bogged down by the performance hits due to the number of images being transitioned within the animation.

Tree Growth Sequence

These are the 6 key frames used for the Spring growth animation. Key frames were drawn in Artrage Pro and cleaned up in Photoshop. Some of the tweened frames were rendered using Fantamorph, even though the end result animation hardly needed it. In order for the frames to load smoothly, I had to make sure not to go overboard using too many key images, so I rendered the bark and the leaves separately. I made separate layers for the leaves and trees within Flash. It was very tricky to animate, but it was fun to solve the riddle of optimizing it for the best performance and speed.

Seasons

The following images are the key images fr each season. I wanted to create each main image with enough style and detail so that at any point within the animation, you can take a snapshot and it will look good enough to print.

Winter

Spring

Summer

Fall