Sudden Death

The Graduate Project at VFS is the single largest portfolio asset generated within the Digital Design curriculum. It represents not only a larger scope than most other projects that students in the program will have worked on but also an opportunity to set a career direction and pursue an individual passion for Digital Design.

Sudden Death fills the void of tastefully art directed and engaging 3D/typographic sports visuals that I found was lacking in mainstream media. It is a combination of my love of basketball, extreme music, videogames and design. An epitome of my learning at VFS and where I stand as a motion designer up until this very point in time.

For this project I began with creating a Notion board to layout and understand my approach to this project. I started by clearly defining the brief and understanding what type of deliverable I would be creating for this fictional client. I like Notion because it allows me to clearly see all of my previz work that I had created so I could easily get a feel for where I was at before going into production.

I then started with a bunch of research defining my target audience and competition. The first thing I wanted to understand was who I would be making this ad for so I could understand what important descisions I could intentionally make pertaining to the target audience. I also wanted to have a strong idea of who the brand was, and what I was creating for.

After defining my brief I moved into my animatic so I could just brain dump all my of ideas to get a start to the project. I first began with primitive shapes and just blocked out the scenes with basic camera movements. Using the viewport render I exported all of the scenes and cut them to music, also roughly placing in where my typography would go.

My process after this stage was just building up the scenes, slowly dialing in camera movements to lock off my shots so I only had to create what was inside the frame. Then I moved into bringing in highpoly assets and would just continue to make the shots stronger. Each big decision would be rendered through the viewport render and cut in After Effects so I could get a feel for the animation as a whole and could show to my classmates, teachers and mentor for feedback.