Animated Diorama

After Effects: 30 Second Whac-a-Mole Diorama

Scroll to Get BTS

Step 1: Creating a Draft (Storyboard)

Click to Enlarge

Why Whac-a-Mole?

The requirements for this diorama were that it had to be exactly 15 seconds and contain at least 12 moving parts. Before even being introduced to the project specifications, I knew early on that I wanted to re-create a childhood game for my diorama. After narrowing down my choices, I settled on a quick and simple game of Whac-a-Mole. In my storyboard, you can see that I carefully planned out the movement of all of my assets and where they would be located on screen as well as some sound effects that I wanted to include. As I got closer to completing my storyboard, I got more excited to carry-out this motion graphic piece and immediately started working on building my assets.

Step 2: Asset Creation

With the help of Adobe Illustrator and my iPad Air, I was able to create all the assets necessary to bring my Whac-a-Mole diorama plan to life.

Drawing inspiration from various clipart pieces, I carefully designed similar assets to use in my production. I created all of these pieces in one document, but placed each on its own separate layer to facilitate the importing process in Adobe After Effects.

By utilizing the parenting feature in the program, I was able to reassemble the pieces and effectively animate the diorama.

Step 3: Entering After Effects (BTS)

A screenshot of the layer panel in my Whac-a-Mole AE project
A screenshot of the timeline panel in the Whac-a-Mole AE project, with keyframes included
A screenshot of the 2 camera views in the Whac-a-Mole AE project, custom view (3D) and normal head-on camera view.

Challenges

Some of the challenges that I came across while putting this piece together were the following:

  • Trying to find creative ways for all the assets to appear on screen
  • Sticking to the 15 second time limit
  • Placing assets correctly in 3D view to accurately portray shadows

Some other things that I found challenging was keeping track of my layers and naming them consistently, but luckily I had named a good portion of them before importing them into After Effects.

Step 4: Exporting

The last step of this project was to export the diorama, which took quite a while because of additional features such as motion blur and of course, the hundreds of keyframes.

After obtaining a final MP4 of the diorama, I published it to my YouTube channel for public viewing.

Step 5: Reflecting

Despite this project taking weeks to complete and consistent work for hours on end, I believe the final result shows the hard work that I put into it. However, If I had more time, I would create better, more detailed assets.