As a new initiative at work to practice more motion design, a couple of us have started a group called the Motion Mingle. It's fairly laid back and on a daily basis we talk through any ideas or concepts we're working on and see if we can help each other out. All of us have a very unique set of skills and experience that lends our thinking to different tasks. For our first mingle we decided to create piece of motion design based around the word 'Floating/Floaty'.

For mine, I wanted to try and mimic the floating action of an answer revealing on a magic 8 ball. I tried to study real footage of a ball in motion to mimic it as best as I could. In trying to figure out how to animate something like this, I learnt a number of new effects and tools. One in particular was using a high contrast plane to mimic liquid dissolving. For this I used an effect called 'Turbulent Diffuse' which I could manipulate over a period of time to create the idea of liquid dissolving. This was fine in a linear aspect but I wanted to find a way to show the liquid dissolving in a circular motion as if it was swirling. In this instance I applied an effect to the comp that contained the Turbulent Diffuse effect called Polar Coordinates. This way it displaced in a circle where I could alter to my desire.

Getting the prism to reveal an answer in a lifelike way was really difficult to finesse but overall, I'm really happy how it turned out.