83,000% Zoom (Excerpt from #PointTaken)
In 2021, Sea Monster was 1 of 3 winners of the U.S. Africa Tech Challenge, a competition led by the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Centre, where African tech companies leveraged their platforms to combat COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and misinformation.
The result was #PointTaken, a series of animated explainer videos addressing the key issues around vaccine hesitancy, and a suite of additional content to spark positive conversations about the vaccine.
In one of the videos, a visual device was needed to try convey the percentages of serious side effects as a result of taking the vaccine. The solution was a bar graph containing three coloured blocks (the recorded side effects), situated within a larger block, within an even larger block, found within a block of this bar graph.
A technical animator's dream, the challenge was to then create a zoom that smoothly travelled between these various blocks which, due to their huge size differences, had to stay in separate After Effects compositions. The result is a 83,000% zoom which takes place over just 73 frames.
Due to the immense scale of this zoom, the amount of ease-in that could be added was extremely minimal, resulting in movement that happens so quickly that the comparative sizes of the blocks get somewhat lost during the zoom.
To remedy this, I added a Time Remap over the zoom's ease-in keys, and then a 56 frame ease-in onto the actual Time Remap when the zoom is taking place. This shot was such a fun challenge and still holds the record for the biggest zoom at Sea Monster.
Made with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe After Effects.
