Short animation I produced in collaboration with Design Science and Dr Adam Kirrander from the University of Edinburgh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpWaTJdMMLY
The piece explores work being conducted by Adam's team which hopes to 'freeze' the rapid motion of electrons. The principles at play here are not dissimilar to those used in early high-speed photography, but in this case involves measuring how atoms diffract rapid pulses of x-rays. The technique is hoped to revolutionise the ways in which we study and understand chemical interactions, such as the breaking and formation of bonds.
This was my first full scale animation project and I learnt a lot in the production process - individual scenes were animated in Apple Motion and then exported and compiled in a FCPX timeline. There are lots of hand drawn elements within the piece, some of these were drawn on paper and scanned in - while others were drawn in photoshop with a graphics tablet - the leaves and eye at the end were drawn multiple times and then animated - that was a lot of fun!
There were some little touches that I found made a big difference visually, such as adding a subtle background texture and applying a faint vignette with blurring around the edges of the frame - this helped to draw attention to the centre.
The voice over was recorded on a Marantz PMD 661 with an AKG D230 - it wasn't recorded in the best environment, so I had to work to tidy it up in Ableton Live. Subtle sound design also helped to bring a bit more depth to the animated scenes, this was also composed and produced in Ableton.