Paperwork - AfterEffects

My two key tasks were to create my ‘Management Jargon’
animation, and to design and test my banner deployment system.
Taking the jargon I had collected I copied it into a Photoshop file,
each separate paragraph or phrase on a separate layer.
This was then exported into Adobe After Effects. I intended to
create a simple animation with text traveling either horizontally or
vertically across the picture plain. It was a steep learning curve
but once I had established how Key frames could be set it proved
relatively simple. A host of You tube tutorials helping me overcome
each technical obstacle.

I soon established that background interest was needed, deciding
upon a layer of small zeros and ones set to a low opacity.
This helped add to the general ‘clutter’ of the work, making it more
visually confusing. After the success of using numbers to add
confusion in the background I also added larger sets of zeros and
ones at full opacity to appear in the foreground. These clusters of
numbers generally travelled faster than the text, creating yet more
visual interest. I used text of varying sizes and opacities to try and
create the illusion of depth so that the work appeared as a deep
unintelligible field of information. I slowed the movement of the
smaller & duller text so that it appeared it was in the background.
With larger text in the foreground appearing to travel through this
illusionistic space faster due to its proximity. This helped reinforce a
sense of depth.

I also experimented with text traveling at different angles and
appearing to move towards the viewer. However I felt this over
complicated the composition and so decided to keep the path
of the text fixed to horizontal or vertical. This seemed to fit the
impersonal mundane quality of the work.
In response to feedback that earlier animations looped too soon at
around 30 seconds I set the duration of the work at 3 minute 30
seconds. With each piece of text representing a layer I soon had an
animation with over 200 separate layers.
However I had encountered several issues with my first attempts:
The document was far too large, in order to achieve a high
resolution I had set dpi to 300 and the canvas size to 70x70cm.
This had made it slow to work with, and when I attempted to
render a clip I was presented with a 3 day wait. Also because I was
importing the layers from Photoshop the text seemed to lose clarity
in its translation.

I decided to abandon my first attempt, halving the size of the
canvas for my second work and avoiding using Photoshop, instead
text was generated using the After Effects type tool. This seemed to
work much better, render times were down to 6hrs and text didn’t
pixelate to badly when test projecting the work in my studio at over
6 metres.

AfterEffects screenshot

Banner system