Mid second year, deeper into After Effects. Much deeper.

We'd done the pinball machine the semester before. That was an introduction. This was the real thing. The assignment was to produce a full Kickstarter-style motion graphics video for a product of your choosing. I picked Larq, a self-cleaning water bottle.

The process was the full production pipeline: choose a product, develop the concept, sketch it rough, create still frames, build the motion. Nothing gets skipped. The still frame stage is more important than it looks: you're essentially storyboarding in high fidelity before anything moves, which forces you to commit to timing and transitions on paper before you invest the time animating them.

Getting used to that workflow took time. Motion graphics at this level isn't just making things animate, it's thinking in sequences, building a visual language first in stills and then bringing it to life in a way that feels deliberate rather than busy. I've always liked the Vox YouTube approach to motion: clean movement, data-driven visuals, editorial quality. Some of that found its way into the Larq video. Not a copy but you can see the influence.

What I learned

Motion graphics is a slow craft. The ratio of planning to execution is higher than in most other design work, and skipping the planning makes the execution fall apart. This was the project where I started to respect that process rather than just tolerate it.