As a motion designer at Bonfire Labs, I animated the Pixelbook's UI and composited it over live footage of the spokesperson for this Welcome video. Rather than rely on screen captured footage, I reproduced the UI in Photoshop, and recreated the Material Design system's animations in After Effects. I also added shadows and animated highlights to create the illusion of watching the actor touch and interact with the Pixelbook's touch screen.
Challenge
We needed to faithfully reproduce the interface and Material Design theme for the Pixelbook, synced to the motions of our actor, YouTuber Todrick Hall.
Role
• Motion designer
• 2D Compositor
• Animator
Process
Security around new products is very tight at Google, so we didn't have a Pixelbook device to use and watch as a point of reference.
Instead of staring at a laptop watching microscopic animations, I reviewed screen captures from the device. I then reproduced them in After Effects, retiming each one to match the frame rate of the video (24.976 fps) instead of the screen capture (60fps). Some of the app icons needed to be created by me from scratch, while some were provided by the client.
Some of the interfaces featured dynamically rendered type and semitransparent backgrounds.
Results
I completed a set of six composite animations for the project, which became part of the 2017 Google Pixelbook product rollout. My experience in UI design and familiarity with google's Material Design methodology helped me reproduce the UI animations with pixel perfect accuracy.