CRYSTAL BEACH

A deep dive into my Animated Background project!

What is Crystal Beach?

Crystal Beach is my first 2023 personal FX project! It was made primarily using Toon Boom Harmony 22 Premium and Adobe After Effects. The animation loop itself is about 13 seconds long and features a fantasy beach with a wave coming in and out of frame. The project took 3 months to complete from design to comp stages, I was using any spare time I had to work on it. I wanted to document my process for this FX animation here on my website and show you all the fun from start to finish!

Concept and Development

The whole idea started when I discovered that you could have an animated background for your desktop and I thought it was so cool that I had to make my own! Starting off I looked around for all sorts of inspiration of animated and realistic waves and water sequences. I am proud to say I am now a huge fan of 10 hour beach wave recordings on YouTube! That is all I watched while working on my project!

As soon as I felt like I had enough reference I opened up Photoshop and messed around with these little coloured thumbnails, Just sort of taking in the music I was listening too and the waves I was watching as reference and really just going for it with the stylization. I would be lying if said the Bee and Puppy Cat's amazing layouts weren't floating around my brain while making this! I wanted the entire vibe of the project to feel relaxing so I tried to create that with this sort of "zoomed in" moment on each of the thumbnails. I played around with all of them for a while until I felt like I had made something pretty decent to build off of.

I posted the thumbnails on my Instagram account where I had my friends and followers vote on which background they liked the most. "A" and "C" ended up with the most votes by a long shot and they actually tied! "B" was the least popular, which made sense because I didn't spend as much time on that one and while I was designing it I sort of fell out of love with the idea. With "A" and "C" tied I asked my following what they liked about each and for both "A" and "C" and everyone who responded praised the color and detail of both but wanted more of a balance so I went straight into the actual background design with that knowledge.

The final beach deign features little details such as crystals, pearls, and various shells. The colour palette is more in favour of "A" with a touch of "C". Overall I think it was a nice fusion of both designs and I am super happy with the result!

Rough animation

At this stage it was really just about figuring out the timing and the feel of the wave. As I animated it more I realized that it didn't quite feel perfect but I decided to stick with it. I know that there is areas in which I could do better with this project overall and I can't wait to apply what I learned here to my next project. Overall it was a very chill and relaxing process.

Stylization of Water

For The actual stylization of the water I took inspiration from my college material on stylized water effects as well as my copy of Joseph Gilland's book "Elemental Magic: The Art of Special Effects Animation." There I found many ways to stylize water and how to make it flow better while also remembering my principals from college. I went for a style that had some edges but was still overall quite round, in this way I felt I had distinguished it enough from the soft background while still keeping it cohesive with the overall piece.

While I was searching for more reference I came across a lot of animated waves from Disney and other studios alike, mostly just to nerd out on how they personified water whether 2D or 3D. Overall they used a lot of timing, shapes, colour, and theme to primarily convey emotion in their various forms of water. One of the references that was most influential on my project was this one animators YouTube named "AnniFlamma" on their video called "Wave 2D Animation", they have a beautiful breakdown on their wave, I especially liked how they separated the foam and how the shadows were placed on the wave to make it pop a bit more and give more life to it.

You can check out AnniFlamma's video here

completed color animation and Comp and FX

When I went to animate it, I started with the outline of the key shapes/poses I wanted to hit, then I went in and drew all the breakdowns, then finally all the in-betweens. The Cycle has three waves that loop together nicely. The animation is roughly 13 seconds long n (about 320-ish frames on 2s), it is the longest cycle I've ever done!

After outline of the wave was done I filled every frame with a solid blue place holder colour and then drew the key shapes of the foam with a new place holder colour, filling it in as I went. I then went on to fill in the in-betweens. This was the part of the process that took the most time, just making sure the shapes flowed into each other but also making sure it felt organic and not like it was on a train track of sorts. After that I went in and outlined my foam with a new placeholder colour for the shadows in the water which I just did straight ahead animation on for the most part as it was very easy to just zone out into since the foam had mostly determined how it would move. Finally I went in and corrected every colour, making the water a gradient and the shadows a bit more contrasted and tweaking things until I was pretty happy, then changing the opacity to be a bit lower to complete the colour and final pass of the animation.

Lastly, I brought my completed animation into Adobe After Effects to add the final vibes to the project. I had a bit of knowledge about the program from college but I am still relatively new, I had a lot of fun learning more about the program and expanding my knowledge from college. From the start I knew that I wanted this grainy VHS aesthetic that you see all over the internet with Lo-fi beats and in other similar media. It's this nice, nostalgic memory for me as I grew up with a VCR and going to the video store to rent movies. Some of my family members owned and worked at a couple video stores through the years and that's what I'm reminded by when I see this Aesthetic. I watched a really helpful tutorial by "MOBOX Graphics " called "How to VHS & VCR Effect - After Effects Tutorial" which you can find here. I followed the tutorial step by step to achieve the effect, then went in and changed things to make it my own, like adding a play button and going in and making the colour adjustments I wanted to better suit what I was going for, which was that calm, chill, Lo-fi aesthetic that I love seeing so much.

Final animation

And this is the completed animation! I seriously loved working on this project, it was a refreshing way to keep up with my skills in harmony and try something new. I already see how I can improve and that's always been my favourite part about learning! The Background is available to download on Wallpaper Engine, but I am still tweaking the image sizing and getting it how I would like it to look at this time. Nonetheless, if you'd like to download it, it is under the name "Crystal Beach."

Thanks for joining me on the page, stay tuned for more of my passion filled work!