WaniKani
Tools
Illustrator
After Effects
Cavalry
Illustrator
After Effects
Cavalry
I created this advertisement for WaniKani, a resource for learning to read Japanese Kanji. My goal was to create a smooth animation with a clean and simplistic visual style based on several different aspects of the WaniKani website.
To start off this project, I wanted to get a good understanding of the product from the perspective of the creators in order to ensure I covered all the main features and selling points.
Luckily for me, they have a page dedicated to explaining what sets WaniKani apart from other products: https://knowledge.wanikani.com/getting-started/how-wanikani-works/
I eventually ended up simplifying it to 3 main points.
After summarizing the most important and unique aspects of the service, I simplified and shortened their main points in their writing style to ensure the ad stylistically fits their website and service. I decided to start the video with a "hook", showing the goal of the website, as well as what you could learn in an interesting and exciting way before showing off the 3 main points of the site. After the 3 main points I tied up the end with a flashy logo animation that represents some processes of using WaniKani.
After having a basic script, I began creating a storyboard showing these points visually.
I wanted to keep this project purely visual, not using voiceover to explain things, so I had to find a way to incorporate these explanations from the script directly into the visuals.
At the same time I also wrote some notes and drew some ideas for how things should move and transition from one section to the next.
I used some basic expressions in After Effects to simplify the process of working with many variations of the same item.
I created these by having the box fit to the size of the text plus a bit of padding, so that you could change the text to the next item and the box would be the correct size.
The text was simply keyframed on each frame to have a different item, and in the main composition the desired item could be chosen by choosing which frame it was frozen on.
For this project I also used the program Cavalry for the shot of the items falling and stacking on each other. Cavalry is a very strong tool for procedural workflows, so it was interesting to see how quickly I could create the shot I wanted.
Since this shot was using a lot of kanji that I wanted to show in a specific order from simple to more complex, manually typing in each one would take a long time.
I was able to load the kanji I needed into a Google Sheets file and load that into the Cavalry file. The Google Sheet feeds directly into the text box, which resizes the box around it in a similar way to how I did in AE.
Lastly the whole system was put into a duplicator to create a lot of them and then into a physics simulation to drop them and have them interact with each other.
While experimenting with Cavalry, I created this video which builds on the same ideas but uses 3 columns of data, and assigns a different color to each item depending on the column it comes from.
