Presenting Data / After Effects / Sarah Nasteruk

Today, I was told to come to the tutorial with some form of map and data that relates to myself. I chose to communicate my journey to my favourite holiday destination, Spain/Calpe, with the inclusion of data that communicates my travel sickness that develops over a duration of time on aeroplanes. I constructed these graphic elements on Adobe Illustrator.

First of all, I placed the Illustrator layers into After Effects t manipulate them into video footage. I animated the layers by generating a stroke to the flight path of the aeroplane, using the pen tool to reveal the original image. I key-frame the aeroplane to move ahead and lead the flight trail heading over to Spain, carefully positioning and rotating along the way.

I then created a transition to guide the viewer to the next page. I did this by creating a larger aeroplane in Illustrator, merged the layer with after effects and animated it to fly across the screen. I created the plane to fill the whole screen and leave a grey flight path that also fills the whole screen, to transition to the next scene.

Next, the scene I was editing is the bar chart data I created to represent the increase in my nausea as the duration of the flight increases. I animated the text to roll onto the flight path of the large plane, creating a nice flow to the animation. I then moved the anchor points to the base of each bar, to scale the bar upwards and level. First of all, I made each bar level at first, as I wanted to animate a plane flying across the base of the bar chart, leaving a flight path that represented the increase in time I was on the plane. This set a good template to scale the bars upwards, revealing my nausea levels and the relation with the duration of flight time. So the longer the journey, the more nauseous I feel. Leading to the red bar, indicating the danger zone. The time I will most likely fall victim to my flight nausea.

I used the red danger zone bar to transition to the next scene. I scale the bar to make it larger and fill the page with red. All, continuing the colour scheme of my data animation.

In the next scene, I have illustrated a character who is throwing up against a red background, the danger zone. This is the part when I can not contain the nausea anymore and i animated my character Illustration to be sick, but what comes out of his mouth is spiralling text that fixes and creates my name. Summing up the animation and to reveal who created the video.

Each of these scenes was created as different compositions. Now, I put the compositions of scenes and transitions together to build the video as one. For each composition, I clicked the 3D space icon, enabling me to twist, push and pull the scenes to create a unique visual effect. This works really well to visually express maps. I learnt this in this process, it creates an intriguing follow and guide effect you would want to communicate when looking at maps and data. A great way to guide the viewer.

Data Presentation / After Effects / Fight & Nausea from Charlie Hamnett on Vimeo.

Finally, I fixed everything together and created the outcome. All in all, I learnt a unique visual way to guide the viewer to different areas of the design, using after effects. To complete the video, I felt it needed a soft soundtrack and aeroplane sound effects to fulfil and reinforce the visuals applied.