Infographics

For this project we were asked to create an animated infographic on a subject matter of our choice. I had chosen to do mine on man made Satellites that orbit earth.

I started by doing research and gathering data about my topic, then I began doing thumbnails and storyboards to help plan out my animation.

I had decided on the style I was going to design it in but not the format and layout of it, so I decided to develop the style and then apply it to all the different formats to see which I felt worked best. I chose to do it in a clean simple vector style, despite not liking how vector style looks, I felt it was the most effective way to present my infographic.

Below I had started developing some still designs for my infographic to help design a colour scheme, type choices and ways of displaying information.

I had then gone onto after effects and created quick motion concept to see how I could have the satellites orbiting

I had done a quick proof of concept to see how this idea could turn out and was happy with it, so I started to develop it.

I had started by gathering my data and then working out a key scale for it to apply it to my design.

Even though I liked the idea I had developed I wanted to see the other direction I could take this so I kept the same style but experimented with the design.

I had then created the static version of the design, adding in some additional orbital routes to help complete the design. I will animate the satellites going round the orbit of all the additional ones too.

I had also experimented with some different colour schemes.

At this point I wasn't sure whether I preferred it in black or white, I liked the black but it felt very flat so I added some small white spots across it to act as stars, to help bring some depth into the design without taking the users eye off the information.

I really liked how the stars look in the background as it made the background more space like and not just a plain black background, it made the use of black feel more thought about.

When putting the animation together though I felt that the smaller sub orbit zones had too many orbiting objects, the purpose of these isn't to show information but to show more types of orbit zones, so I removed all the smaller satellites from them and just had one on each of them to show how they're orbited, as with multiple on it looked like there was so many different animated elements that it was pulling your eye all over the design.

I felt that just having the one satellite orbiting the smaller zones looked more effective.

I had put in a vector outline of earth to see how this could look in the design.

I had then changed all the blue dots to earths and did quite like how this looked.

I wasn't sure on whether to have the globe rotate or not, as I wanted to keep it looking flat, so I animated a globe going round.

Then I started animating the whole comp, since I wanted it to be a gif, I didn't want it to have a beginning or end point in the animation, that way the animation can be played over and over, to do this I needed all the animated elements to end at the same point in able to restart the animation in a loop, I chose to set the animation length for 48 seconds, so each element of my animation must be a factor of 48, and depending on what factor it is will depend on the amount of rotations and speed of the specific animation.

Below is the first comp test I had done.

Then I wanted to try the design but with the rotating globe for all the earth.

I then tried the comp in white to see if it looked any good but wasn't feeling it. But I felt like the all white version looked better without the globe as it had a cleaner look to it.

Below Is the final version of my animated infographic, I had changed it slightly to give it a narrative and to help guide the users eyes through the animation to help them effectively take in the information, as well as adding some sound to the video.