I was asked once if I could animate a cartoon car with flat tires driving slow while another car with 4 good tires passes by. It was for a potential awareness video about spending time with and reading to your very young children. A child that doesn’t get that attention, at a very young age, is simply held back in life. I think the script idea went something like… “It’s like your child has 4 flat tires while everyone else around them has 4 good tires. They’re simply held back while others move on around them.”
I never got to make that video, but I couldn’t get it out of my head, so I just decided to tackle it for fun. I wasn’t in the habit of doing cartoon style animation. I started to think about how I could make a really cool 3D model of a mountain, the road, the grass, a couple of cars and do some really cool camera fly bys from the tires up to a shot from above to see the other car pass by. Then I threw all of that out the window, opened Photoshop, created each element, then animated it in After Effects. While I’m not totally pleased with the result (the tires could have been flatter and the ride should have been bumpier), I’m very pleased with what I learned. I thought outside the box that I was usually confined by and I’ve used some of the methods that I learned on many projects since then.
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