WTR20 All-Hands - Auroxx
Section title for Comd. Will Riker’s keynote on new fashion trends on the pleasure planet of Risa. I do not know why I decided that Auroxx was a Starfleet side-gig, but there it is.
The client story.
Auroxx is not a real global fashion brand, but I assure you this was a real client project. To be honest, I wasn’t privy to whether or not our agency was NDA’d on this job, and so I took the opportunity to cover my bases and show off this project’s toolkitting superpowers in one stroke.
The Auroxx WTR20 All-Hands event is a series of prerecorded presentations, produced seasonally, that gives Auroxx’s C-suite and product leads an opportunity to address their worldwide workforce. The deliverables were a full toolkit in the vein of a broadcast network package: opening titles, section titles, and lower-thirds. Our client needed a premium design that looked bespoke, delivered on a tight timeline, with the added wrinkle that the presentation’s editor would need to add or change the content at a moment’s notice.
The craft story.
With no branded imagery or footage forthcoming from the client, and no owned color palette to speak of, my creative brief for WTR20 was essentially black, white, and a font. It just so happened I’ve been obsessing over some incredible kinetic type work by artists like Stefan Hürlemann, crisscross, and DIA, so I pushed for a bold type-driven direction with loud figure/ground play.
Just two editable text layers at frame zero drove the comp’s entire layout, and only a few “lead” layers contained any keyframes. Every other layer in the comp relied on parenting and loads of interdependent slider controls to position itself in the grid and animate in response to its parent’s own movements, sort of like points on a waving flag.
For example, each text layer’s slider (called “Progress-Local”) was driven thusly:
parent.effect("Progress-Local")("Slider").valueAtTime(time-thisComp.layer("Control").effect("Delay")("Slider"))
//The previous value of my parent’s Progress-Local slider as of [Delay] ago
And that same layer’s Position property used that result like this:
s = effect("Progress-Local")("Slider"); //The above slider’s value (from 0 to 100)
t = linear(s,0,100,key(1).time,key(2).time); //Get the key time at ‘s’% of the way between my two keyframes
v = valueAtTime(t); //Get the key value at that time
[parent.sourceRectAtTime().width+20,0] + v
//My X position is directly to the right of my parent, plus 20px padding, plus my keyframed offset
While the above handled horizontal lines of type, a similar parenting scheme and expression block also pushed multiple lines vertically, creating a dense grid of type. Propagating that through almost 180 text layers produced a really cool “whiplash” effect that looked totally intentional no matter the line length of the editable text layers.
In hindsight, I wish I’d made use of DuIK Bassel’sParent Constraints for this setup; that would have allowed me to build a true “mesh” behavior since the layers’ positions could be negotiated between all their neighbors rather than driven by a single parent, but c’est la vie, maybe next time. Man, if only Cavalry had existed when this project crossed my desk!
The personal story.
I remember some trepidation in the room when this high-octane brief fell into our laps with no branded assets to support it, and no time to build much in the way of artwork in-house. As with most creative constraints, though, our team did find a certain strength in threading the needle between all the many requirements.
At the time, WTR20 was the most ambitious toolkitting gig I’d tackled, and I wanted as much of the design conversation to inform that effort as possible. The animation was going to look pretty cool, yes, but more than anything I was hungry to make something that worked. Seeing my little responsive Rube Goldberg machine accept a single text input and trickle it down through dozens of interdependent layers instantly? Whew! What a thrill.
I made Auroxx WTR20 All-Hands to flex some serious coding and project-organization skills, and it seriously leveled up my confidence in building responsive toolkits in After Effects. I also got to turn the whole thing into a Star Trek joke for my website and it only took like five minutes.
Credits
Design & animation by Jared Flynn
Agency: Genuine
Client: Auroxx (not really)