Ave Maria By Frank O’Hara

Year: 2022
Role: Motion Designer
Time: 5 weeks
Brief:

For this piece, I was asked to create a minute long visual accompaniment to a poem of my choice. 

“Ave Maria” by Frank O’Hara, in its most basic form, is a juxtaposition between the ideas of freedom and isolation. 








Concept Development


I began by trying to understand the poem as fully as I could. I started with 30 minutes of freewriting; then, I worked on a personal analysis of the poem by printing out the type and writing over it. Finally, I created two mind maps to identify and move away from the clique iconography associated with these words.












Storyboard / Styleframes


While creating the storyboard, It was important to create scenes that embodied Freedom and isolation while maintaining the poem's narrative movement. It was also vital to physically draft the poem's words on the storyboard as a preemptive measure to synchronize the frames to the poem. This synchronization would be essential that each frame was not rushed or sluggish when I went on to animate.






Style Frames












Cinema4D to Illustration


One of the main issues I had to overcome within this project was the hurdle of matching the rounded style 3D creates to my hand drawn illustrative look. I solved this issue in three ways: creating Luma matts out of my 3D footage, using blend modes to layer textures, and even re-
drawing the footage frame by frame. 



















Frame by Frame


I have a theory in motion design; because you don’t have much time to tell your story, you must be efficient in summarizing large portions of your narrative in single details. In this way, motion design is very similar to a poem.
I was pleased how the hand's scene bridged this gap and
told the beginning of this love story in 5 seconds.