HOW TO CREATE A PORTFOLIO
CATEGORY
TOOLS
TIMELINE
✏️ PROCESS
I start a lot of my video projects out with storyboards. For this project I found a typography combo I liked, then I drafted thumbnails and my narrative flow in Figma with simple shapes. I wanted the project to be deceiving— it should look like a regular, lighthearted advice video at the start, but then devolve to an existential crisis (inspired much by how my portfolio work sessions go).
lofi storyboard
After putting this together, I went straight into After Effects and got to work. Because the compositions were relatively minimal, I found a stock video of a paper texture on Getty to keep the every scene dynamic. Most of the content in the first couple scenes were vectors and typography that could be directly created and animated in After Effects, but then I began adding handdrawn elements and boils from Procreate.
Then came time for the character, the poor suffering soul that's having a rough time with the creative process. I made him a cat, for not much reason except that I like cats, but also because cats are amorpheus blobs that would be recognizable no matter how haphazardly I draw the frames.
The cat is mostly drawn in boils and then has a couple longer animations at the end, all drawn on Procreate and exported as GIF sequences into my main AE comp.
some handdrawn frames and the scene they created
Lastly, I needed a voiceover to read the script that I had put together. I wanted something official sounding and deep, kind of like David Attenborough's voice, which my voice was unfortunately not. My professor for this class had introduced some AI tools that could not only clean up audio, but voice change recordings pretty convincingly well, so I decided to give one of them—Eleven Labs —a shot.
It turned out sounding really natural and I had fun playing voice actor for a day. It was great because I had a decent mic I used for gaming already, and because I knew exactly what I wanted in the final outcome— I didn't have to direct one of my friends or someone random to use a certain tone or speed!
