"Making Biryani" 2
This is the second part. Here is the first bit.
Let’s just cut to the chase before diving into a few relevant process details. Here is the final piece:
In total there were a further two more sessions.
Let’s just say that it was a long weekend…
Thinking clearly is essential
Just like marshalling an army, creating an animated infographic really requires a lot of clear thinking and coordination. For anything approaching this size it has to have some kind of logic or it becomes unwieldy and the confusion really compromises the progress.
I started by creating a better overall shape and look.
I know you’ve seen this already but it’s so pretty (thankyou LN for your super valuable input).
After a bit of reflection, I ended up on this organisational schematic:
1. A 2D flat orange layer to frame everything.
2. A general guide layer to line things up and remember the overall picture.
3. The drawn bits separated as a large transparent png layer.
4. SVG layer of masks which draw-off to reveal layer 3.
5. All textual elements - same transparency format to layer 3.
6. SVG layer of boxes which fade out - same method as layer 4.
7. A container group with all of the pop-up images (see below for more on slicing it up).
To animate things as I’d begun (see the first part) was just too exhausting (I honestly didn't have the time), so I decided on having three modes of delivery for greater efficiency:
text sections that fade in as and when
images which (mostly) pop up
swirls and lines which draw/extend onto the canvas
In the end I varied this a little as the mood took me - it felt appropriate in some cases to fade on or have things already on screen. The pop-in images worked a lot better with certain enunciated bits. With hindsight, if I had the time to rehang or redesign this entire piece I would work a lot more closely reviewing the soundtrack as a priority rather than as an afterthought - due to pressures on my spare time I rushed this and it turned out to be more of an afterthought unfortunately.
In the end this piece ended up way too busy. As an exercise in developing visual language I am really pleased, but as a piece of clear learning communication it doesn’t work as well as it might - there is too much force-feeding and cognitive overload (cardinal educational sins!), and I think listening to the soundtrack is key to getting a feel for what is or isn’t paced right. Anyways FWIW - glad to have invited you to my funeral.
Using the slice/export tools in Affinity Photo (pictured here on the iPad but later transferred to the Mac desktop version) saved me a lot of time. By doing them in order and then quickly naming each slice you can organise a lot of material very quickly.
Some gains worth mentioning
In no particular order here are some of the gains from this project:
Using Affinity Photo to slice up the pop-up images (see note on the gif above). Such a useful organisational timesaver and so instinctive on the iPad.
Working with Motion shortcuts and creating my own custom behaviours saved a lot of clicks. Using Motion via the file menu and trackpad is incredibly slow, but I sped things up a lot using keyboard shortcuts and making my own versions of behaviours.
Frustrations and things to change ‘next’ time
If you look closely enough you will see that some of the swirly drawn-off bits have a weird stumpy ending. This, it turns out, is because the lines being drawn originally are too thick. If you want a precise draw-off you have to create a more precise masking line. This is something that stands out - the extra time taken to carefully draw these things and plan them out makes a difference.
I struggled with the masking technique in Motion. Originally I was using a very lengthy (and limited) workaround where I was using the ‘colorize’ filter to make the SVG swirls the same as the orange background, but these occasionally had to be edited so that they didn’t overlap with the other drawings. In the end I should have used a (relatively) simple masking technique like so:
There is an image layer below the swirl layer - this is linked to the (switched off) brown drawn SVG swirl mask above.
This would have allowed greater flexibility with lines being properly clipped and allow for overlapping to occur. Anyways you live and learn.
The massive gain here is that I am now confident in developing much more complex infographic explainers. When I first started out I depended on resolution-limited screen captures as I drew on Procreate on an iPad. Now I can transfer (supposedly) infinite hand-drawn vectors from CSP into Affinity - then out through PP - and into the Motion/FCPX workhorse.
"Making Biryani"
This is the first part. Part two is here.
Since starting as a learning designer last September there have been plenty of opportunities to develop my design thinking and practice in real-world situations. Instead of squeezing the odd project in here and there between tectonic school pressures, I get to devote decent stretches of time to solving really interesting learning challenges with design. I love it. Having said that, I still spend a fair amount of time in the evenings and weekends developing my skills through personal side-projects (the 3 Forts video was a recent example).
I wanted to document a little about another of these that has been chugging away at the moment: “Making Biryani”.
Cooking proper food
For a long time, my cooking skills have largely consisted of sauce jars and ready-meals but with the recent change in circumstance I have been doing a lot more proper cooking. When Guy Lodge tweeted about a biryani he was making I asked for some details. He sent me a really good recipe to start with. I have made it a few times now and each time it feels like an event to invite people round for. Thanks Guy for the link. And yes I really need to start inviting people round.
Explaining the making
I will say it outright: explainer projects either need to be paid well or have deep personal meaning because they require so much effort. If you ever you see one online, try to spot which of those it is because they are gruelling as you wrestle with the details. This is, of course, the joy of them as well - seeing a bunch of important details etch themselves on a huge virtual canvas in an understandable way is a lovely thing.
The 3 Forts video was meaningful for me (my first marathon across amazing scenery combined with learning how to draw and animate maps): it merited the time and I don’t regret it (much).
“Making Biryani” is similar - to be able to make something this tasty from all of these delicious ingredients is a kind of turning point in my own growth as a person (honestly I’m not over-egging this: I have an immigrant, working-class background and this is a huge thing). Also, I have been chipping away at the RSA/Animate whiteboard-style explainer format for a while. The Religion and Worldviews Paradigm piece I did last year for the RE council was a big step in that direction but there’s still room to travel - and this project is how I intend to make those steps.
Just to be clear: in this piece I am exploring how to communicate the process of cooking a delicious meal by animating hand-drawn notes to a scripted narration.
Initial notes
I did some early sketches using a square-formatted page thinking this would work as a serious if about 8 Instagram images.
My initial sketch broken into a few stages.
A More Detailed Slideshow (for instagram)
So after a bit of drafting I put this slideshow together.
Forming it into an explainer video
From here I have begun to think through how to create something that animates on a larger canvas. The proprietary vector¹ drawing layers in CSP are genuinely useful in these situations because you can go back to the original artwork and resize/appropriate if needed (something I find myself doing occasionally as the bigger form requires an adjustment).
Here is my initial attempt to corral the eight instagram square images into something continuous. As it turned out I had to scrap this after some initial efforts.
From here I began to do a dance between Affinity Publisher, Pixelmator Pro, Apple Motion and back again. I was careful to number and duplicate all of my steps and then group them into ‘sessions’. Here was session one:
Realising a few things needed tweaking I came back to it the next morning:
I thought it was simpler to just screenshot this instead of boring you with a blow-by-blow explanation.
This is the test export I produced - it has a few issues but some parts are working really well.
The principle technique being used here is to draw vectors over selected items with the pencil tool in Affinity Designer using the iPad pencil like so:
The red is a vector-drawn pencil stroke in Affinity Designer.
Then in Apple Motion (via the usual PP export option) I would create a write-on behaviour and time it carefully like so:
The vector lines are here in a bluey-purple and I have changed the opacity so you can see a bit of how I have done it. Notice that the ‘write-on’ behaviour for ‘Path 17’ is set to erase. In the actual project I have set the entire SVG group to ‘colorize’ as black so it completely masks it out.
At this stage I realised that there were some details I had missed and instead of rehanging the whole thing again I decided to take a break and get some air.
Some thoughts before closing:
making sure the main image is high-resolution enough is really important - in the next session I will re-export those vectors from CSP at twice the size. This version is borderline acceptable. It’s one of those things you can only figure out as you go. I got increasingly frustrated that I couldn’t zoom in with it looking a bit pixelated.
the write-on Apple Motion behaviour works quite well for most elements but it is hard to get handwriting to animate properly without it being excessively fiddly and time-intensive. I am looking for smart and cost-effective ways of doing this kind of stuff and I wasn’t about to do lots of individual lines unless it really required it. In the old days of similar OUP/REC work I did screen recordings of Procreate handwriting but this needs a slightly different approach - I am not sure what to do… (maybe just having it appear via a fade-in is enough?). A related question is: how much more/less effective is this for the audience if you DON’T see things being written? Is it just me being a fussy person sitting alone at his desk in the wee hours getting fixated over nothing? Does it matter to have it appear in this way or is the flow of logical information enough?
My instincts - with a bit of a break - are that if the script and storytelling are engaging then the images don’t have to be super-intensive… I think.
More to come.
(Part 2 - where the dish actually gets served is here)
¹CSP vectors don’t operate like the usual svg tools you find in Affinity, Pixelmator or Adobe - but they are genuinely helpful to have around and I never draw final art these days in CSP without it being on a vector layer.