Assigned to make an animation based on memories, Ryan decided to animate a true story about how he remembered a time in his life differently than his brother did. After Ryan wrote the script (basing it entirely off a true phone call the brothers previously had) and recorded the dialogue, he got to work drawing out each scene in Adobe Photoshop with an XP-Pen tablet. To create the fluid, comic-book style that he wanted to portray, Ryan made as many elements of each scene into different layers, so that they could be keyframe animated individually within Adobe Premiere and After Effects. With the many layers each created and exported, Ryan spent many days and hours keyframing each element, timing their rotations and positions to utilize the eye-catching overlapping and follow-through principles of animation.

Background

Ryan was tasked with making an educational video about a part of nature, Ryan chose to focus on a topic he always thought was interesting, plant leaves. A leaf’s life is a perfect circle, from growth to death, and in death, used to grow anew. The life cycle of a leaf is a cycle that includes a lot of physical motion and transitions, which allowed Ryan to create interesting visuals. Interesting and constantly changing visuals is key to keeping educational content for all ages engaging the whole way through. In creating these visuals, Ryan used many different video editing and animation techniques to bring his ideas to life, with Adobe Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, and an XP-Pen Tablet.

Camera Motion Across Art

Ryan wanted to simulate a first-person camera moving through a forest at the beginning of the video, and to achieve this, he create several different large backdrops. For the first shot, Ryan created a long, horizontal image of a colorful forest in Adobe Photoshop, then used the camera position keyframes in Adobe Premiere to move the camera slowly across the drawing, from left to right. Following this same technique, Ryan made long, vertical visuals for trees without leaves in winter, which fades into the same trees with leaves, in the summer, all while the camera continues to scroll. Lastly, Ryan also made an image of a floor covered with leaves, achieving this through creating his own custom Photoshop brushes, shaped as different types of leaves. These extensive backdrops, when combined with the motion of the camera in Premiere, create an exciting, colorful visual that keep the audience engaged.

Combination of Techniques

Using a similar technique of moving a camera in Adobe Premiere, across a large piece of art made in Photoshop, the section of the video that discusses Microbes (1:22-1:48) simulates motion across an over-sized animation, changing focus along the scene. In this part, Ryan frame-by-frame animated the tree drinking water, and the microbe eating then spitting out the nutrients from dead leaves, in Adobe Photoshop using an XP-Pen Tablet. With the frame-by-frame animation complete, the motion of the leaves and nutrients were done by using Adobe After Effects on top of separate, small drawings of leaves to simulate fluid motion as they drift through the wind. With all the aspects of the scene animated on the large canvas, Adobe Premiere was used to move the camera across the scene, following the leaf as it blows slowly down.

Techniques like in the previous example, of using After Effects for fluid motion, Premiere for basic motion, and Photoshop for creating the art assets and frame-by-frame animation, were used throughout the video. These techniques were used in various ways with unquiet visuals in each scene, with the intent of keeping the video consistently engaging.

Rotoscope Animation

Ryan has always been fascinated with various animation techniques, and one of his favorites to explore is the rotoscope technique. He used this technique, of tracing around real-life footage, to make several segments in The Life Cycle of Leaves. For one shot, he filmed himself walking, looking down at the floor. He then traced along this video, making sure to capture the indents and folds of his jeans to give the animation as much weight and realism as possible. To make the coloring process easier, Ryan did the outlines for each different moving aspect of the body in a different color. By coloring the lines differently at first, Ryan could then know what areas to fill with what color on the next stage, without getting certain parts confused with others. When the rotoscope animation of him walking was complete and colored, Ryan put it on top of the large image of leaves on a path, following the camera’s motion, to make it seem like the audience is walking across a forest themselves (0:13-0:19). This same technique was used for the scratching the chin scene (0:29-0:40) and the zipping up the jacket scene (0:08-0:12).

When Ryan was tasked with taking something that is often seen as mundane, and making it surreal in video form. When researching potential topics, Ryan discovered that there were two nuclear energy facilities powering Virginia, something he never knew until then. Out of pure interest, he watched Dominion Energy’s video explaining why nuclear energy is perfect for Virginia, and Ryan was put off by how many times they mentioned the word safety and the Fukushima tragedy. The attempt by Dominion Energy to normalize nuclear energy in people’s mind while simultaneously mentioning safety so many times you begin to wonder more about the dangers, Ryan felt editing the video into something even weirder would be fun juxtaposition.

The original Dominion Energy video was mostly narration, so Ryan transcribed the video into Microsoft Word and began reading over the whole video to come up with ideas. Through leaving notes in the document, and coming up with several jokes and random editing ideas from this script, Ryan began work in Adobe Premiere. Most of the video is made to be ironic given the subject matter, but given that the subject matter is something that the narrator needed to consistently specify that it was safe, the jokes often ended up being more dark in nature.