We The People
The Bill of Rights
Netflix produced a series of animated videos that covered a range of U.S. civics lessons. Set to original songs over various styles of animation, this series attempts to teach viewers about government and citizenship in approachable and digestible ways.
This specific video focused on the first 10 Amendments of the Constitution; AKA the Bill of Rights. Styled to look like collage, this was a long running project at BUCK, touched by almost every artist at the company. I had the privilege of seeing it through to the end over the last months. The style of animation was very rewarding to work in. Often, we were animating frame by frame to achieve the collage look.
Contribution
This scene was my first task on the project. I was in charge of animating the camera move from the close up table, to the wide shot, as well as the background shredding to reveal George Washington underneath. This scene was a fun challenge to achieve realistic paper texture for the ripping strips.
This Rocket Fist scene was my favorite to work on. The challenge was to build tension and make it look like crumpled paper. I ended up utilizing some “stop motion” techniques here.
To achieve the paper texture, I crumpled sheets of copy paper, frame by frame, to get a sequence of crinkles. I then imported the paper photos in After Effects, and composited them around the fist to give the illusion that the fist was pushing against the paper backgound to break free.
The final moments posed their own challenge, mostly in the number of layers that needed to be animated. The crowd scene was so large, and there were hundreds of individual precomps to keep track of.
In the end, this was a great learning experience in terms of file organization and management.