Thought at Work is an annual student-run design conference in Rochester, NY.
I helped to design the title sequence.
DURATION
7 months
ROLE
Concepting, Illustration, Asset Creation
TEAM
Rohan Pawar, Dylan Davis, Nicole Simone, Tessa Cote, John Keefe
OVERVIEW
The theme of the conference this year was voices, so we tried to represent the entire chain of design from concepting to creation to final delivery while staying true to the visual style already established by the conference.
Illustrating from a distance
Creating a title sequence is already a difficult task, but trying to do it when you're 300 miles away from your team is even harder.
I played a large part in defining the visual style for the animation. We started with one frame from the animation as our jumping off point with the conference's colors, but soon realized we would need more than just that to help keep our visual style consistent. We established rules on stroke, use of cap styles and the way shadows should look.
My largest contributions to the project were illustration and creating a large number of assets, textures and modular elements that I compiled into a library for everyone to use in order to help keep everyone on the same page style wise.
Some elements from the asset library
Representing all voices
We sought out to represent all different kinds of designers in our animation, but oversight happens.
Halfway through the animation process, I noticed the only female presenting character in the animation was in the scene where she is at home, and all the characters were white. That's a fundamental issue, especially with the message we were trying to portray. We had to edit the style guidelines a bit to allow for a greater shade range so we could fully represent all voices in design, but I do feel it is something I should have spoke up on sooner.
Being a team player
Although I didn't get to do much animation on the project, I learned how to be okay with that and focus my energy on doing as much as I could for the project.
Because our team was all working separately on the title sequence, we decided to split the files into three checkpoints in after Effects and a 3D scene in Cinema 4D that we could later stitch together. Basically this unfortuonately meant that only 3 people could be animating at a time. I ended up not doing a bulk of the animation, and mainly focused on assets and illustrations.
Animation is the fun stuff though, and even though I didn't get to do a lot of it, I realized how important all members of a team can be. Regardless of role, I still feel I played an important part in the process, and I'm proud of where that has led us a group.