Creating the Book in After Effects - Alexia Vargas Arevalo

Alexia Vargas Arevalo is a young After Effects artist on our composting team, and a recent graduate from UAL (University of the Arts London) where I gust lecture. Her main job was creating the beautiful book, She had a head start using a 3D Book template for Adobe After Effects but it was still a big design task to create our pages, and light it carefully to bridging the opening live-action title sequence with the CG book.

Alexia worked remotely from London, and I asked her about her experience working on what was one of her first jobs in the industry.

Working with the team has been a pleasure, even though it was remotely, I was amazed at how incredible everything was handled. Thanks to David who was always keen to encourage and keep the team together. The project was very challenging due to the short time available.

As the After Effects artist, I was in charge of designing and animating the CGI Book, which was very fun to do I must say! What was not as fun was the rendering after every shot was done, as it took hours and hours to render all the details and so much time waiting. Meanwhile, I was able to help in the preparation of James's illustrations for Harmony, so all that time would not go to waste. Thank you Chloe for your guidance.

Working in this animation gave me a different perspective of how animation can be done. Effectively created with watercolour illustrations and having just this huge animation in a short time, makes me realize that anything is possible as long as you have a great team like this one.

A little trivia - we’ve used real-world textures to make the CG fit the live-action… the coffee table is my own!