STORY + PROCESS
This is a streaming graphic I made for this up and coming Youtuber and Filmmaker I've stumbled across on my YouTube Shorts feed named Amarii Usher.
Long story short, I was able to reach out to him and mentioned that I did motion graphics. Later he reached out to me and asked if I could make him this streaming graphic so that he can use it when he started streaming. I told him I was more than up to the task.
He gave me this illustration that was made for him and asked if I could animate that illustration to life— of course I said "yes."
What my client requested is that the entire illustration get animated, from the background to Amarii and the wolf.
I took a long look at the illustration, and immediately realized I had to do some rigging and playing a lot with phytsics.
What I did was worked on the backgroud first. I knew I had to add some particles and fractal noise for the background.
With the color of the background I did a linear color gradient and went the same colors I saw primarily. Then I saw red and blue and thought of a flashing police light. Looking at all the elements I added altogether (the background, the lights, the particles), I looked at it and something wasn't right.
I even showed Amarii and he said the same thing. He also told me to exclude the flashing lights. This is where things turned out for the better.
I decided to go for a darker yet 'familiar' look. Something that is dark yet inviting, like a dark violet wine (which is one of a color is what I decided to go with, along with a much darker violet wine color.
Using Red Giant's Trapcode Particular, I played around with the position over time, wind turbulence and the motion blur. I made sure the particles it matched the sparks that was in the illustration. I added transparent layer of a gradient of topped off with glow from a plugin called Deep Glow (this is probably irrelevent but they made Deep Glow 2 and it looks pretty cool). I made it look like there was fire somewhere at the bottom right.
Later came the hardest part: making an illustrated subject or subjects move. I remember seeing wiggly anime looking subjects in digital art. A prime example is the home section in the game called Marvel™ Rivals.
I had to take out the sections of the guy in the hoodie (Amarii) and the wolf in Photoshop, from th strings of the hoodie to the ears, mouth, and fur of the wolf. I had to add puppet pins to areas like the spike ends of the fur. Then I had to add bending to the tail. When it came to the breath I just used Particular, set the particles to explode periodically, added a fast box blur on top to make it look like breath.