The Age of the Restoration

While at HMH, I had 2 weeks to get this bundle of joy together. One of those classic People-talking-about-stuff-and-the-imagery-reflects-the-VO things, this time using a slew of scans and images from old books, manuscripts and newspapers. This short piece is about The Age of the Restoration, probably best exemplified by one Mary Wollstonecraft who was pretty much the first feminist philosopher, and as it happened, mother to Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. It was part of a number of animations done for various history modules in HMH’s educational publishing wing. The vast majority of them are monochrome line drawings from the 16-1700s , so I coloured up some layers in Photoshop, set them to Screen and marvelled at how goddamn awesome they looked. Then I chopped the images up, added some animated awesomeness like fire, smoke, 3D cameras, bokeh, depth of field, frames, inverse kinematics and whatever else to bash this out in a suitable timeframe. As it happens, this type of animation is really useful for adding life to photos for documentaries and infographics, both of which are areas I have a lot of experience in.