Recreating the Watch_Dogs 2 Artstyle
Being a fan of the video game "Watch_dogs 2", I was enamored with the artstyle that was chosen for the game, I decided to try to recreate some aspects of the trailer design in Adobe Aftereffects.
Below I document the process of my recreation.
The Inspiration
This is the video that features as the background of the Main Menu. It mixes CGI animation and ASCII-Art inspired motion graphic to add to the games motif of "hacking". The Motion graphics were what I used as inspiration for my designs.
The Background
First I worked on the circle background. I used the "Radio waves" effect to produce the expanding circles, and for the inner swirling line I used the pen tool with the "twist" effect, with some changes to the anchor point.
Throughout the project, the glitch effect are produced by a combination of two AfterEffects plugins: PixDither & Pixel Sorter + the "Mosiac" effect.
For the dotted background, I used "fractal noise" alongside the two plugins to create the ASCII-art-esque background.
For the dots inside the swirl, I used the "Grid" effect and played with the settings to make it look like small dots, and then alpha matte'd it to the swirl.
For the dots inside the swirl, I used the "Grid" effect and played with the settings to make it look like small dots, and then alpha matte'd it to the swirl.
I adjusted the colours with an array of effects such as: "Exposure", Minimax and tint.
Skull Animation - Part 1
Part 1 of the sphere skull animation was animating the skull. For this, I took a non-copyright skull icon from google, and animated the jaw position in AE using a mask and some position animation.
Skull Animation - Part 2
Part 2 was putting the skull onto a circle. For this, I just used "CC Sphere" and adjusted the light settings until I found something I was happy with. I then animated the rotation using keyframes.
Skull Animation - Part 3
Part 3 involved putting everything together. For the background I used a gradient ramp for the B&W colour.
I also created 2 layers with fractal noise to create the base for the dotted texture of the background, and a duplicate that used "Find Edges" which created 1/2 rectangle edges which gave the background a mosaic look.
I then created 2 adjustment layers. One with "PixDither" and "Tint" to create the dotted background and darken it slightly, and one adjustment layer with "Pixel Sorter" to give the glitch effect.
On the Skull sphere composition, I added the effects: CC RepeTile to duplicate the sphere composition which causes multiple spheres to appear on screen, giving it an "infinite" look, "Posterize for colour" and "Invert" to change the colour of the sphere to black.
I then used "CC Slant" to skew the spheres slightly, "Wiggle" to emphasize their sideways movement and added the second "Find edges" effect and moved it up slightly, to complete the mosaic background effect.
After that, I animated the skulls with vertical and horizontal movement using keyframes, and added a slight glitch effect at the beginning of the video using "Pixel Sorter".
Big Skull Animation
For the big skull, I found a greenscreen video of a skull rotating on Youtube. From there, I key'd out the greenscreen with "Linear Color Key". I then used "PixDither" to create the dotted ASCII looking texture on the skull.
I then used posterize and Exposure to make sure that the colour of the skull was as close to the circle background as possible so that it didn't look out of place.
To create the glitch effect, I animated the skull using "Pixel Sorter" and keyframes at various stages of the skulls rotation.
Once again - The Final Product
Once the two videos were put together, the end result looked like this.
Thank you for reading!
