- Adobe After Affects
Fantasy Hockey Game Animation
When I started this project, my goal was to seamlessly combine a video with 2D animations. In doing so, I would gain experience masking, tracking, and animating objects in Adobe After Affects. I came across this video of a hockey player on Adobe stock, and I had the idea to turn it into a player selection page for a fantasy hockey video game.
If the game was real, I envisioned players drafting a fantasy team based on only the hockey player’s statistics. Players could look at the athlete’s position, height, weight, age, and their levels of speed, strength, power, stamina, and control, to determine if they wanted to add the hockey player to their fantasy team.
The original video of the hockey player was only around 20 seconds long. I edited the video to loop when the player reaches the center of the ice, making it so that the player would slightly rock back and forth on the screen. The Yes/No option that appears above the player is being tracked to the player’s head, so that it also follows this rocking motion. When creating the animations for game player interactions, I wanted the animations to communicate that controls were being used/pressed, since there is no one interacting with this animation with a real game controller. This is why, if you look closely, you can see the scale of the Yes/No buttons change when the selection moves between the two buttons. The Yes button also slightly pulses and then changes color, indicating that the option was selected.
All of the graphics that I added into this scene were also created within After Effects. I decreased the opacity of all of the graphics and added glow effects to them to make them look like holograms in the scene. Then I added a screen effect on top of the entire composition.