The essence of this project dealt with using photos and the colors of the brand. Nothing crazy…but then I made it crazy.

The lobby was going to be designed with giant cubes stacked on top of each other so naturally I wanted to find a way to recreate that same feeling in the assets I created.

The first problem I ran into was the fact that After Effects (AE) is not a 3D program, and I haven’t learned any 3D programs (yet). Right off the bat I made things difficult for myself. Luckily, there is actually a plugin to make cubes in AE (Create3DShapes - aescripts + aeplugins - aescripts.com). This plugin absolutely saved my life on this project, but I did run into one problem with it which I’ll bring up later.

Now that I had a way to make cubes in AE, I needed to actually make it look good and enjoyable. My first version was not even close to looking good. I attempted to recreate pretty much the exact image above, and boy did I hate it.

See? Nothing special. Imagine watching that go back and forth for 5 minutes. I would fall asleep. It was just boring, and I didn’t have any idea in my mind of how to spice it up so I went a different direction.

This direction was a little closer to something I wanted, but at the end of the day I needed it to loop and this direction was complicating that. I didn’t set it up in a great way to be able to loop, but I also wasn’t in love with what it was doing. There was too much movement for me. So I took what I liked from the second attempt along with some feedback from the art director and finally landed on the look that ended up sticking!

Is this the greatest thing I’ve ever made? No. Am I proud of it? Yeah, I actually am. Did it take forever to render? Absolutely. That was my only problem with that plugin. The render times on this were insane! To render the full 30 second loop took 5 hours…Thank God that I could simply set it to render before I went to bed and wake up to a finish product.

All in all, I walked away happy with what I made for this project, and that isn’t the case every time. I’ll probably dive into one of those projects next. There’s a lot of them.

What to do with Cubes???