CoMotion 2022

Comotion is a student-led motion graphics conference that is hosted at SCAD annually. All materials for the conference are created by a student-run branding team, including the title sequence which kicks the event off each year. This year I joined the project as the 3D animation lead! The theme for this year’s event was ‘2.5D’ and this statement by the team’s creative director Miharu Murai sums the overall concept up nicely:

“2.5D is centered around the idea of 2.5 dimensional space. This design language embodies the essence of motion graphics through its fluid and flexible nature. Within this boundless space, we were able to reflect upon our innovative and experimental field that keeps pushing us to evolve. Join us to embrace and celebrate the limitless possibilities of what we can achieve with Motion Media.”

Check out full title sequence below:

Full team credits can also be found in the video caption.

Process

Creating a huge collaborative project like this took a lot of problem-solving and one of my major roles on the team was helping to optimize and package assets that the entire 3D team could use, which included making rigs and assets for other animators. Check out this process reel below to see how some of my favorite elements from working on the sequence came together:

Initial shot designs were created by Miharu Murai, Yu Xin King, and Yorlie Avila. Typographic animation was created by Desmond Du. Audio is 'Future Showreel' by penguinmusic.

Textures

One of the big challenges of this project was creating illustrative 3D textures that matched the feel of the 2D portion of the sequence. We went through lots of iterations to get this right, and I ultimately ended up making an asset library with textured primitives that other 3D team members could use in their sections.

Initial tests:

Final Library:

Rigs

Each of the 3D shots were populated with a lot of assets, many of which needed to have similar animation. To help make this process more streamlined and easy to control, I created a couple of simple point cluster rigs in C4D. Here are some demos of how they work:

The final version of this stair rig had scaling issues fixed (to do this, I had to remove protection tags so that width could be controlled in the object’s channel/coordinate box without blowing out the size of the lettered stair controls). The rest of the controls operated the same.