Elephant - Animate your Imagination
Creating custom animations can be time-consuming, especially for beginners who need more time in understanding basic design principles and various tools. Through user research, I identified an opportunity to streamline the creative workflow from the initial brainstorming to producing a finished animation, allowing users to create and communicate their ideas more effectively.
Elephant is an animation tool concept that makes it easy for users to bring their ideas to life, eliminating any learning curves or complex software. Users can create downloadable animations and easily edit, tweak, or personalize them to fit their creative needs.
Overview
Product Designer, Motion Designer, Animator, Illustrator
Role
Tools
Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects
Timeline
Jan 2024 - March 2024
Generate stylized animations
Users can generate animations from a simple description with the option of stylizing the output. Style options allow for experimentation, variations in design, and personalizing the user’s experience.
Choose from multiple variations
Showing variations allows users to choose the design that suits their needs. The “Quick Style” or “Edit in Workspace” options can be used for further modifications or to add any special effects.
Edit in workspace
The Elephant workspace is an all-in-one editing platform that includes a range of features and tools to help users finalize their animations or create a project from scratch. To animate layer content, keyframes can be used within the timeline to set parameters for effects, motion, audio, and other properties.
Automate tasks
Automating animation tasks reduces the time and effort spent on manual adjustments. Additionally, default presets can be applied to layers to simplify the creation process and speed up the workflow.
View Projects
Projects can be organized in one place within the Library section. Users can view recent files and share projects with collaborators as well.
Asset Library
The Asset Library library can be accessed through the toolbar and contains a collection of pre-made and custom assets. Users can modify these assets and also add any interactive elements.
Interactive Tutorials
Providing quick and easy tutorials keeps users engaged and up to date with the content.
Animations
Through this project, I was able to create several animations from scratch which conveyed a sense of visual storytelling with a natural feel. I also learned animation fundamentals by focusing on principles such as composition, timing, movement, shape language, and character appeal.
Reflection
Elephant was a personal project and although many areas while designing this concept were new to me, I enjoyed involving myself in various roles to bring it to completion. Experiencing the challenges of learning animation firsthand is what inspired the idea and direction of the application’s flow.
A challenge that I faced during the project was understanding the implementation of Artificial Intelligence. While some AI use cases do have significant benefits, this technology has given rise to many unethical practices in various fields as well. As an artist, I wanted to explore how AI could be used ethically, especially within art and design mediums, without scraping and infringing on anyone’s personal work without permission.
If I had more time:
I would conduct further usability testing with beginner animators and technology experts to see if this solution addresses the main pain points and is also feasible.
Think about the business model of the application and how a future roadmap might look like with additional functionalities and use cases.
Due to time constraints, I was unable to properly research how the animations could be ethically generated using training models or data. My intention was to prioritize community focus over relying on training the application on random and untrusted external models. Moving forward, I plan to continue conducting primary and secondary research on this topic and refining the approach based on feedback.