In this tutorial we will face a common problem when a client gives us a still source (eg.poster /logo) and vague directions – ‘it should look good’. In my case, I had a poster of a new theatrical play and less than days to bring some life into it.

The finished piece was supposed to be subtle and a bit sexy, so I decided to divide the poster into 2 sections: a background that I would reconstruct in Cinema 4D and the simpler foreground that would be done entirely in AE. Cinema 4D would let us simulate some physics and would bump up the ‘motion value’ of the original still graphic that is much harder to depict as being affected by forces. The poster can let us hide the ‘stitches’ from C4D so we won’t have to spend so much time with compositng – and time is money here, so we cut where we can.

The foreground is a bit more static since we only can afford to make subtle movement otherwise we distort the poster so much that it becomes distracting. We can safely put a little motion into her hands, and reveal her tattoos while still maintaining the original message of the poster. In my final version I also added some face movement with a displacement map as a bonus.

Hope you’ll enjoy this breakdown and get some cool new ideas out of it.