It all depends on what I’m trying to achieve.
Stage 1
For freelance jobs I usually start with style frames and storyboards as this needs to be presented to the client. I ought to do the same for VH actually because this is a time when you make a lot of creative headway, without being bound by functionality and all the rest of it, but for VH I actually usually start with a piece of music and a short written plan which I then work straight into After Effects. Largely because it’s hard to justify two days of style-frame design time on a Videohive project. As things stand at the moment, they have to be quick to produce to make their time back.
Sometimes I work very loosely and quite creatively, just creating a feel of what I’m trying to achieve. Other times, I will build a system using expressions, which I can then animate and play with. But either which way, Stage 1 involves quite a bit of play time.
I try to work in time where I can just play and not worry about how neat everything is. A lot of ideas headway is made during this time. This is the time when you find out whether the foggy notion that you have in your head actually works and through this process of trying to realise what you had in your head, you often stumble upon great new ideas and forge a strong creative direction.
Sometimes this stage can be a short animation sample that will be expanded on later, sometimes it will be a sketch of the whole project.
Stage 2
This stage is expanding that core idea up to a whole project and refining it. If it’s a live freelance job, I’ll often spend quite a bit of time tidying up and restructuring, because I know that when the going gets tough later on, deadlines get tight and clients start changing stuff that it will help.
Also for Videohive, probably more restructuring goes on, because I start thinking about how it might look to the fresh eyes of a user, who perhaps doesn’t have much experience. I have to decide where to make it customizable, where to strike that balance between simplicity and customizability. I change my mind quite a lot during this process. I often do test renders and optimize the project for speed.
I’m not a keen Stage 2 man. For freelance jobs I find that it starts to feel like endless rounds of changes and that the actual invention in the job was only 10% of the work.
For Videohive stuff, many projects fail at stage 2. I feel like I’m getting intensely bogged down, that I’ve made something too complex to strike that balance between simplicity and customizability. I have tens of projects on my hard drive that stopped some way into Stage 2.
-f.
Request processing...