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Tutorial 190: Cicada
🕑 Added 2019-08-22 16:31:24 +0000 UTCHi everyone! We're going to be making some more generative art inside of After Effects this week. If you try this out, tweet us @workbench_tv!
I was working on some other ideas for this week's After Effects tutorial, and I wasn't really getting anywhere. So I took some time to do other things and just take a break. Wednesday morning, I was rowing and while I row, I watch videos on YouTube. Great Big Story just published an excellent documentary series on Cicada 3301, so I was watching the last two episodes and I thought their graphic treatment was interesting.
I've been a fan of Cicada 3301 and puzzles like that in general. When I was a lot younger, I discovered a cool puzzle that I've linked on our site because it has a name that might get me demonitized, and I don't want to lose my $3. Anyway, I spent a while going through it. I never finished it because I didn't have the time, though I should probably go back to it. But ciphers, steganography, etc. have always been really intriguing to me.
So, combining that with my love of Albert Omoss' work on the FITC Tokyo 2015 titles I quickly thought of a way to build a stupidly simple L-system-ish expression to make generative lines. We randomly choose directions and lengths, and draw points at 90 degree angles. So we end up with interesting paths, almost like a 2D version of the old pipes screensaver!
Taking those paths and combining them with shape modifiers we can make all sorts of things—lines, boxes, paths for movement, etc. You could even take these and use other modifiers like twist to get really odd looks and movement. This technique renders pretty quickly too. Our example is a little slow, but it has camera blurs, grading, and more so keep that in mind!
Have fun experimenting with this. I'm sure there's a lot more that can be done with this if you take the time to explore! And grab the Cicada drawing from aniszewskas here if you want to use it.
