“Without Tack’s novel approach, we would have spent several costly days manually animating each chat message.”
Representative
Blumhouse Productions
The Challenge
The idea of manually animating a constant stream of text messages designed to look like a live social media broadcast for the entire length of a feature film is not only extremely daunting, but a real logistical nightmare.
The Solution
Working simultaneously with the wider post production team meant that things were changing all the time — so we had to come up with a bulletproof solution that could withstand last minute amends and changes but also be fast enough that it didn’t bog down the entire post production pipeline.
Using a database as the master data source, which was accessible by the client at all times, with 1000s of rows of unique text messages, timecodes, usernames, profile photos and various other data points, we built a custom After Effects script that automated the entire animation process in a matter of minutes.
The tool also magically added keyframes in the right places which drove the animation — some messages were central to the narrative of the film and therefore had to appear at very specific times.
We included the ability to manually adjust and tweak the resulting animations on a granular level, in case there were any very small changes that meant running the entire script again would be inefficient.
That’s it for this one. Not to worry, there’s plenty more to see.
