This project was a ton of fun. A client and colleague of mine brought this project to me when he needed some help bringing his vision to life. This colleague was currently filming a documentary working with one of the countries largest cannabis growers with the intention of selling this piece to Netflix.

For this documentary he required a timeline animation that would be utilized throughout the film. His inspiration was the timeline used in the netflix series Cocaine Cowboys. 

I was able to use this inspiration and the client provided project fragments as a starting point. I then went about getting as creative as I could with what I was provided. The white pot plants would be the backbone of the piece but I knew it needed to be fleshed out with textures, background elements, and subtle touches such as motion blur.

Instead of a timeline we wanted the progress of time to be illustrated by the roots growing along the screen. Oddly enough the best way to achieve this with some flexibility was using an After Effects provided lightening effect. With the right key frames this effect could take on the look of a branching root network.

To achieve a certain look for some of the background elements I was able to build a single right to left animation and then put this on repeat via the Loop() expression. 

to provide texture I played around with using various alpha channels, modes, and masks. I utilized some grunge textures as well as various smoke photos and videos to act as alpha channels. 

As an example the dates that move across the back are passing through various videos of smoke so that it looks like they are coming in and out of view. Due to the need for future customization the entire project was built out as an editable template. I condensed as many layers into Precomps as possible and added in Time remap keyframes so that the speed of the timeline animation could be altered to fit the documentaries needs.