Behind the Scenes: Animation with Lead Editor, Ken Green
At MuleTown, we have the pleasure to help and serve companies from all industries. The tech industry makes up a decent portion of our clientele. We were honored to be approached by one such company in the “Software as a Service” (SaaS) space, to create a video to spearhead their marketing efforts. This particular video now lives on the company’s homepage and serves as a quick introduction to who the company is and what they can do. I’d love to point out a few key design and animation techniques that makes this video so special.
In this example, we have a young professional stepping into the scene. The movement looks very simple to the audience, but if one peeks at the back-end setup, it can look complicated! Each body part is drawn separately and grouped together in their own “containers,” or layers.
Each body part (or layer) has it’s own “controller” layer, which you can see here with these green and red pins. I’ve essentially created a virtual puppet and now I have the freedom to take this person and move her around as I please.
This is called Character Rigging and it’s a very common technique used by animators all over the world. Rigging takes a lot of time to set up at the start, but doing so saves us lot of time during the keyframing and animation process later.
Simplicity and autonomy are some of the best friends a video editor, designer, and/or animator can have.
Here, we see a 3D model of a workstation being rotated. Interestingly, this animation piece is not a 3D object at all. These are just flat 2D shapes being animated using their basic transform properties such as scale, position, and rotation.
Using a few lines of code, I’m able to loop this animation (in this case, a “ping-pong” loop) without having to animate each movement from scratch. I animate the movement once and the couple lines of code takes over the rest.
These clever techniques allow me to create things that look sophisticated while being able to animate and render out very quickly, saving you time and money in the end! I can’t wait to partner with you on your next communications strategy.
– Ken L. Green, Designer & Editor.
