How do I incorporate more handcraft in videos? I’ve been thinking about this lately. My work is largely digital by nature, but I want to find ways to incorporate more of the organic, human side of things.
I was working on animating some titles this week for a video and was inspired to incorporate some textures into the graphics. For this video, it was adding the texture of card stock to the backgrounds for each of the text blocks. Hopefully, this gives it a tangible feeling and adds a little bit of delight to the animations.
I also finessed the animations to imitate cards dropping onto a table. Whenever a card drops, it appears larger in my field of view than when it lands, so there’s a scale aspect. There’s also a gravity aspect and the settling of the card once it contacts the table. Little details like this used to drive me mad, but now I enjoy diving into subtle nuances of movement.
The tools I use to create digital graphics often steer me towards creating clean, perfect shapes. The platforms where the finished videos live often steer me towards simple and flat. Cleaner shapes are more discernible in a feed. Videos with less texture, or grain, compress more cleanly into smaller file sizes. I still want to be mindful of simplicity and precision, but I also want to explore ways to add a little bit of imperfection and humanity.