DISTANCE TRAVELLED

This project was very much inspired by the work of Peder Norrby who is the lead designer of one of my favourite After Effects plug ins - Trapcode Mir. Around the time I made ‘Distance Travelled’ I had been watching a lot of Peder’s Mir tutorials and happened upon a series of animations he produced where he had generated rolling landscapes, giving the impression of a camera soaring across mountainous terrain. Visually these landscapes lacked any form of photorealism and appeared quite simplistic, but I found the minimal look of these particular animations very eye catching. You can watch them here - http://vimeo.com/46819908.

Visually, I wanted this animation to reflect what I had learned about 3D motion graphics production in the past year. So ‘Distance Travelled’ visually recycles and incorporates earlier animations, using previous work as a visual skin. One of the great features of Mir is the ability to map moving image video files to its computer generated meshes. This opens up a huge amount of possibilities for experimentation and visual connection to other projects I have produced.

‘Distance Travelled’ is undoubtedly an exercise in perfecting a very specific motion graphics technique, but I think the mapping of earlier animations to the landscape I generated for this piece have added an unexpected visual curiosity that I am personally quite proud of. I hope you like ‘Distance Travelled’.