Versus Monthly Challenge: Rick and Morty
The theme for March 2018's design challenge was time travel. Now for this challenge there was no rules, just the theme. I didn't want to do anything 'Back to the Future' style because it felt a bit too generic, however I went for the next best thing, Rick and Morty
I love the world building of Rick and Morty, it's super colourful and rich with content to play with. I wanted to create a short motion graphics video where Rick is using his portal gun to jump to different dimensions that abide to various time rules.
I needed to create a walking Rick and at the time I had no experience in animating something like this. Like a fool I also left this challenge fairly late so I had about 4-5 evenings to produce something (a lad's got to work during the day). So I did what many designers do in this situation… to Google!
Okay, so this isn't Rick just imagine it's his very round skeleton. Following the video I managed to create the movement I wanted, now for the real body.
To pull this off I needed to piece the body parts together like a puzzle (sounds quite grim). So for example the head was the first point of action, to create this I traced Rick's head from a screenshot using Sketch...
Now, you may be asking:
1. Why the fudge are you illustrating in Sketch, are you physically sick?
2. Why not just grab a PNG? ರ╭╮ರ
I have a reason, I'm not just wild at heart. First of all, transferring an Illustrator file to After Effects at the time was an absolute pain, there was a nifty tool developed by this boss Google employee that allowed you to easily transfer layers from Sketch to After Effects. Yes, to clarify it was easier to transfer layers from a NON ADOBE PRODUCT than it was from AN ACTUAL ADOBE product, but that's fine I don't care
Following on, once I transferred the vector file over I simply pinned it on the skeleton to match it's movement and hid that part of the skeleton. I proceeded to do this with the rest of the body.
Now I had this sorted I moved on to some trippy stuff, from dimension to dimension I needed to have a portal transition.
This was actually quite easy to do, using the particle/plasma effects in After Effects I created a portal with its signature green. I even created Rick's portal gun (yes using Sketch) and for extra nerd points I added the plasma effect in the container of the portal gun, using a masking tool.
So before making major decisions about the duration/flow of a video I like to select the music first. This just allowed me to really get a sense of the tempo and match vital points for the transitions and loops.
So I went with the intro of Logic's song Warm it Up. I felt the tempo and the build up of this track really had the vibe I was going for.
Fun fact: Logic was actually featured in a Rick and Morty episode (Ep. X)
So for the final touches I used various After Effects 3D/Background effects for each dimension. I even chucked in a falling Morty… this is the final result