Aetuts+ Weekend Workshop #7 – “APPZUBI”

We’ve recently started a new weekly community project where we’ll be posting a video created by one of our wonderful readers, then ask you all to offer constructive feedback on the work. It’s a great way to learn more about video, express your viewpoint, and have your own content critiqued! Submit your own videos at the bottom.

Quick Ground Rules

1. Play nice! We’ve deliberately chosen videos that aren’t perfect, so please be constructive with any criticism.
2. Feel free to offer any type of advice – movement, lighting, color, pacing, etc.
3. You can also link to videos that you feel offer a great example of this type of content done exceptionally well.

Without further ado, here is this week’s candidate for critique!

“APPZUBI”

Story Behind the Project

This is a commercial clip for “Appzubi“, an app for youths who are searching for an apprenticeship but still don’t know which one to choose or where.

The video is a mixture between 2D-animation and real footage and has been produced within two weeks from scratch. We used Mocha, Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere.

We didn’t have much time for the whole project so we had to do everything as simple as possible but still in a way that looks and feels good. First we made a quick storyboard, some character scribbles and the text to be spoken for the clip. Then we had a day for the shooting, then 2-3 days for the illustrations and design elements, then 3-4 days to animate and for compositing. Sound production and voice recording started simultaneous to the animation but always in good convention. Finally we got an animated clip 2-3 days before the deadline to be shown to our client. Then we had these left days to add some detail and make little improvements to the animation, cut and sound. It took us about ten workdays to get the final clip.

For the character illustrations we’ve done some rough scribbles, then imported them to Photoshop and recreated them all with shape layers. Here we had to think about what we wanted to animate to make the right number of paths (shape layers) for each character / element. In After Effects we got all these shape layers as separate layers and comps with masks which we were able to quickly animate. Then added some FX and color correction to the final look. All the shots were tracked with mocha to link the elements to the real footage.

Hope you like it! Feel free to check out our website!

Please let us know what you think in the comments – how would you have approached this project or done things differently?