Orpheus and Eurydice

I gravitated towards the story of Orpheus and Eurydice because of its themes of love and trust as well as a negative ending of trust being broken. I wanted to modernize the story in order to make it more relatable and also to challenge myself to take away the aspect of magic and fantasy. I wanted to make an animation to just be able to work with After Effects a little more and to be able to draw my own characters. The idea was to create a frame-by-frame black and white animation that would look have a sketch-like aesthetic, but once I started working on it I realized that doing a frame-by-frame was just way too ambitious. So I decided to draw the scenes with the moving parts on different layers and do minimal animations with the majority of the animation being camera movement. I drew out each shot in separate Photoshop files and imported them into After Effects to animate them. One thing I learned throughout the process was to pre-compose anything that could be pre-composed. At times I would have between 8-15 layers from the Photoshop file, and having that many layers on one composition was messy and overwhelming. I also learned that having the music and sounds before animating made animating easier because I could animate to the beat and rhythm of the music. I made the mistake of animating some parts before adding in the music and had to change a lot of it once I added in music. After watching the first cut, I realized I needed to slow down the animations and pacing of certain parts. While working on it, everything seems too slow, so I would always cut the animations short, but I realized that I didn’t really give enough time for the viewer to process the visuals or leave enough time to read the text. If I could do this again I would maybe try a different way of creating the characters, maybe not having to draw them out each time because that may have been the most tedious part of the project. I would also probably change some of the plot points because right now the story doesn’t entirely make sense to me, and the pacing in certain areas don’t quite work (like the ending being abrupt and confusing). The overall process was really quite eye opening about the thought process of rewriting a story to change it to fit contemporary culture and the process of animating a story as a whole.