Puzzle Piece Love Story Diorama

Name of Project: Puzzle Piece Love Story Diorama

Project Case Study | March 2022

For this project, I was tasked with creating a 3D diorama story using After Effects and any other programs necessary. The diorama can be any topic or theme of your choice; however, it must have a comprehensive and united aesthetic throughout the film. Additionally, some other steps must be completed before the scene can be produced.

Along with a storyboard and finding design elements that will increase the feeling of wholesome fun, the diorama must have at least 15 keyframed elements, an opening and closing curtain, audio components like music and sound effects, and fade in and fade out from black within a desired time. Lastly, the project must be built at a HD 1080p preset with a 15 second duration.

Storyboard Ideas & Sketches

I choose to do a fun puzzle piece love story for my diorama. After seeing the way two puzzle pieces always seem to fit together so perfect, it gave me the idea of using the puzzle pieces as a love story. I was able to find some landscape elements from the website Vecteezy, www.vecteezy.com,  which helped me with the overall theme and color choices for the diorama.

First, I had to create a storyboard for the story. This consisted of multiple sketches created in the chronological order. This helped me determine the major keyframes and chapters in my story. I was able to write down the ideas I had for audio elements along with the types of animations I was going to use throughout the scenes.

Once done storyboarding, I created the rest of the elements I was going to use in the project such as the main characters, Blue and Pink, the pathways, etc. in Adobe Illustrator. Next, I had to import the vector elements into After Effects and start to build my project out in the software as a 3D animation.

Although there were a few challenges throughout this project the one that I learned the most from is when Blue picks the flowers up from the pathway and gives them to Pink and they run away together. This was difficult because I had to duplicate the layers and change the in and out points to match exactly with what I projected the flowers to be doing.

Additionally, I had to parent the elements together which helped me avoid having to create additional keyframes for each character. Since I was able to parent the flowers to Blue and then to Pink it created a smooth transition of the flowers being passed between the characters.

I was able to eliminate the space between Blue and Pink’s hands that increased as they ran away. I wanted them to be connected as they ran off together and originally used keyframes to make it happen, this left quite a bit of space between the two puzzle pieces as they moved. To helped eliminate the space I was able to parent the two pieces together which helped keep the puzzle pieces together as they ran off together and the scene ends.

In conclusion, I was able to learn a lot of After Effects, animations, and motion graphics. This project helped teach me about the different layers of design that are included in motion graphics.