I was drafted to collaborate on some animated icons for Profile Raising International Ltd's new website. The brief was to create four animated loops, transforming a common element (circles of dots) into different symbols created from those dots. The website designer wanted the dots to move and transform 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 an accurate representation of the gradients, and added glows and other effects to sell the final look.

Animation is often about problem-solving, and that was certainly true in this case. It was highly satisfying that, upon delivery, the icons were even better than they had expected.

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

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