motion design trading cards
The challenge for this project is to make an animated trading card dedicated to motion designer “Ariel Costa”.
He is one of the most respected motion designers I have always looked up to since I started motion design. I made this card with love for motion design and him.
The quote
“We need Motion Design trading Cards! Maybe a whole deck of playing cards with cool Motion Design work or historical figures. I’ll trade you one Imaginary forces’ Karin Fong for a Lotte Reiniger! Maybe Ariel Costa for a Ash Thorp! Maybe you can only see the values in AR? Hmm, who would even be on 52 cards? Who would the Jokers be?”
research
research on trading card
history of trading card
One of the most powerful Pokemon Card
The most expensive trading card
Trading card (or collectible card) is a small card which usually contains an image of a certain person, place or thing (fictional or real) and a short description of the picture, along with other text (attacks, statistics, or trivia).
Some of the rare cards can worth a lot of money. 1952 Mickey Mantle trading card recorded the most expensive trading card in history which cost 12.6 million US dollar. Often, as more rare and stronger the card is the texture and design are shinier and more intense.
futuristic trading card
Ariel Costa (BlinkMyBrain)
research on Ariel costa
Ariel Costa is a motion designer specialized in mix-media. He is also known as “BlinkMyBrain”. He is an Emmy winning Creative/Animation director base in Los Angles, CA.
Characteristics of his work are
Mix-media (collage)
Gradient
Strong texture
Sharp edge vector shapes
Exaggerated human figures
AI generated images of futuristic trading cards
To get idea of how trading card from the future would look like, I used DALL-E3 to generate some references of futuristic trading cards. I used them as reference for composition and layout. Prompt I used to generate these images is “Give me some images of futuristic trading card for motion designer” and I explained more details to get the images I wanted.
Porsche by Ariel Costa
1st pass
Design Approach_01
note
Design Approach_02
Me and my art director agreed that the design is not strong enough and I should make it more illustrative and visually more interesting. We also agreed on having minimal animation and focus more on the design of the card.
My original idea was to create a short introduction video of Ariel Costa by using the concept of trading card. But me and my art director agreed that it will be better to focus on making a trading card itself and animated the card.
BoardOmatic for introduction video of Ariel Costa
2nd pass
new designs for trading card
additional Sketches
note
It was difficult to tell if it was a card about Ariel Costa just by looking at the design style, so me and my art director decided to borrow his style more into the design.
final pass
Final design of “Ariel Costa Trading Card”.
I tried to incorporate more textures and mix-media into the design to match the design style of Ariel Costa.
Ref for logo
I got the logo design references to use inside the card through Dall-E 3.
animation
final animation
I started with making rough cel-animation and start smoothing out by adding in-betweens. And then start cleaning the lines and add color. After finishing color, I added the shadows.
I animated the mouse by using transform warp tool in photoshop to make it looks like it’s move and rotating.
Rough name animation
Rough hand/face animation