A highly accomplished designer, Peter McCabe, drafted me in to collaborate on some animated icons for a website he had designed and was building for Profile Raising International Ltd. The brief was to create four animated loops, transforming a common element (circles of dots) into different symbols created from those dots. Pete described the vision he had as being like a drone light show.

I experimented with different approaches and soon came to realise that I had a delicious challenge on my hands. I had a lot of dots to manage, and I needed a procedural approach to this, i.e. there was no way each one could be animated individually. I used Cinema 4D to achieve the goal of transposing the dots from one object to another, utilising matrix objects, cloners, and inheritance tags. The most intense task was breaking up the objects into different fragments based on the number of dots they contained; as you can see from my sketchbook below, it was a beautiful meditation in itself. I composited everything in After Effects, ensuring accurate representation of the gradients, and added some additional effects to recreate the appearance of a drone show. Job done!

Animation is often about problem-solving, and that was certainly true in this case. It was highly satisfying to have 'cracked the case' and the results, I think, speak for themselves. Hearing Pete say that the icons came out better than he expected was a great reward for all the dot-counting and precision geekery that went into crafting these loops.

You can view the animations on the Profile Raising International website:

https://profile-raising.com/awards/