Hand-Me-Down Animation Assets
ISSUP are an international company who organise drug recovery chapters across the globe, and who Posh Gecko had been working with throughout the lockdown period - before I'd even started working for them - to create their first animated video explaining who they are and what they do. That's a much longer turnaround time than usual, so while I was finding my footing as office newbie, we figured a project without a strict deadline would be perfect for me.
As this is the first time I've worked with other animators - at least not ones that I trained myself - this was the first time I'd worked with another person's animation files. It was a great opportunity to investigate another, more experienced animator's working process as I'm a relatively inexperienced user of After Effects, having only picked up the program a year before starting at Posh Gecko. It also happened to be the work of an animator who works exclusively in After Effects, unlike myself and many others who use other Adobe programs such as Illustrator or Photoshop to create assets/artwork and bring those into After Effects.
Having pre-approved assets to hand made the project much speedier than anyone anticipated. I was able to dive straight into storyboarding from the client's script knowing that aesthetically, the client would most likely be happy with my work as it's stylised in line with the preexisting assets and animation. ISSUP more or less approved the storyboard on the spot and this allowed me to focus my efforts on the animation itself and injecting movements that would challenge me and aid my skills development.
International Animation
After the English language version was swiftly approved, I turned my efforts to the international versions of this explainer video. As an international company, ISSUP need their videos to be accessible to all of their users. Luckily I've had previous experience building animations that have to be translated in up to nine languages, so knowing that this one would have to be translated, I built any sections containing text to accordion easily. With minor timing tweaks to allow for and align the international voiceovers and minor visual tweaks to create or contract space for any words that appear on screen, the international versions were pretty speedy to do.
On the whole, this was a much smoother project than anticipated and it was a great introduction to the Posh Gecko process.
I'm part of the Posh Gecko team, ownership of this project belongs to Posh Gecko and/or the respective client and has been posted with the relevant permissions.
