Final GIF

Alright, this is it! Here's what I present for my class project. I tried to use as many concepts from the class as possible, even though I exported most my visuals from PS. I made use of trim paths, mask expansion, grouping my shapes together, path animation, repeater, some wiggle path, as well as basic playing around the graph editor. It had been quite a while since I last touched AE I had a lot of fun with this class, Jake. Thank you so much for putting up this content.  

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Hi everyone, Hi Jake!

I'm really happy to be starting this class. I was a big fan of Jake's first class The Ultimate Guide to Kinetic Type and did a little project on American Psycho (You can check it out here). Since this class' project is also on a movie, I figured I would pursue my current theme of Murders & Executions... I mean Mergers & Acquisitions with the very nice and thoughtful Patrick Bateman.

A few keywords come to mind when I think of this movie:

- Cleanliness

- Luxury

- Obsessiveness

- Briefcase

- Business card

- Axe

- Chainsaw

- Rain coat

- Nail gun

- Big telephone

- Blood

- Videotapes (gotta return them videotapes)

- Business suit

I'm going to try to make sense out of that and create some kind of design for my animation. Stay tuned.

INSPIRATION

I have this idea where an axe would strike on the American Psycho title in a very clean, white environment, as Patrick likes everything so perfect and neat. And maybe a touch of blood. I've been searching many types of styles so here's a couple of them that I kept.

EARLY DESIGN

With the objective of keeping this very minimalistic, I designed a background with the text in a way that fits my inspirations. I still want to keep some textures in there. I'm not sure if it's allowed? Anyways, here goes:

I'm at the point of designing the axe and hand that will come from the top in the animation. More to come.

Further design iteration in Photoshop. I decided to create some splashing blood that will be animated. The idea is that the axe falls on the title and some blobby blood comes out floating, with an interesting timing, kind of without gravity. Not sure how I'm gonna do this yet. I also wanted to create the main contrast with the axe, being the most important element. That's why I reduced the opacity of the shadows.