PIVOT : A Digital Women's Conference

When life gives us lemons, we can choose to make lemonade or we can set them aside for another day. 

I’ve always admired people who are able to rise up through the ashes of a crisis and make something amazing out of nothing. Danae Edmonds, my friend, mentor, and girl boss, is definitely one of those people. As an advocate for women-owned small businesses and women in general, she saw how the COVID crisis was affecting this group of people, and felt called to do something to help. The idea of hosting a conference came from watching celebrities showcase their talents on social media and realizing how many talented women she had in her network. I think it’s so special and rare to have an idea like this that seems so out of reach but you believe in it so much it almost seems possible. 

I distinctly remember about a month ago, on April 2, I was working out when I got a message on Instagram. I wiped the sweat from my forehead as I opened the message to see it was Danae. “Hi love! I have a question for you. Do you have like 10 mins tonight or tomorrow? No rush.” I hopped into the shower and called her immediately after. 

We started talking and she told me she wanted to have an animation for her conference and said she had immediately thought of me. I felt so honored and completely terrified at the same time! Danae wanted to commission an animation as a way to introduce her conference and while I’ve made little animated gifs before, I’ve never animated something so important for such a large audience. To top it all off, with the conference taking place in a month, I knew illustrating each frame by myself would be exhausting, so this was definitely a project for After Effects. Before all of this, I had never used After Effects. Imposter syndrome took the reins at that moment, and despite it all, I thought to myself, “You can do this. Say yes. Don’t be afraid.” So I stepped up to the plate and got to work! From there, we began emailing back and forth, expanding on the theme of lemons to lemonade and sharing ideas.

I threw myself knee-deep into my research and stumbled upon so many incredible resources and references. I took some awesome classes on story boarding for animation, how to animate with After Effects, and animating characters on After Effects all through Skillshare, which is such a great learning platform! I watched all of the animated shorts on youtube and vimeo that I could find, studied tons of animated gifs, and watched several videos of trees blowing in the wind (you’ll see why in the story boards below). 

Trying to come up with a story that was believable and inspiring was one of the biggest challenges I faced when putting this all together. If you don’t have a good story, no matter how beautiful your animations and illustrations are, you have nothing. So I took my time working and reworking my ideas and asked the people I trusted most for their thoughts as I unfolded my story.

Several story boarding sessions and cat cuddles later, my story went from this 👆🏻to 👇🏻that. Thank you to all the people in my little corner that listened to my ideas and helped me develop it!!

You’ll notice that the first two scenes in the story board below were greyed out because I wanted to make them monochromatic. However, once I started illustrating those scenes and animating them, I realized that having them differ in color from the rest of the story wasn’t going to turn out how I imagined. So in the final piece, I decide to leave them in full color.

I created a variety of color palettes for the animation based on the mood board Danae and I had created together. She picked this one as her favorite, with an emphasis on darker skin tones.

Once we got down to all of these details, I started on my stylized scene! A stylized scene is one you pull from the story board, usually one that includes most of the elements from your mood board and color palette, and bring it to life! This gives your client an idea of what the rest of the animation will look like.

Once I got Danae’s approval for the stylized scene, I started animating! After Effects is a monster of a program, but after this whole project, it’s become one of my favorite Adobe programs. You can do so much with it! The CC Bend It Tool is definitely my favorite tool to play with now. I also learned so much about the relationship between illustrations and animations. You can have an idea illustrated but the way you want it to be animated might not be the best. There is a lot of trial and error. And watching your static characters develop into dynamic characters that express emotion and movement throughout your story is like nothing else. It is so rewarding and so much fun!! 

So now that we’re here *drumroll please*! I present to you Pivot, A Digital Women’s Conference! 

I am so proud of myself, of Danae, and all the women who came together to make Pivot a real conference!! It’s amazing what you can do when you persevere and let yourself finish what you start. If it wasn’t for Danae, I never would have pushed myself to dive so deep into After Effects and create something so meaningful! I’m even more grateful that I took on this challenge because as I make my career change from advertising to animation, I now have proof that this is what I truly want to do with my life and that I have all the capabilities to tell a well thought out story. 

Thank you so much for letting me be a part of your conference Danae! I had a blast and I cannot wait for our next big idea!