We started off very interested in 3D printed, so we knew that we wanted to do something with that. The ideas came naturally as we storyboarded; we would start with food today and end with food tomorrow. The original idea was to have a video that zommed in to the next slide after every frame. For example, we would see a billboard overlooking a highway, then zoom in to something on the billboard that was included in the next scene. We wanted to have our music resemble that of an Italian restaurant, but ironically, the best music we could find was French.

Since neither of us had experience using Adobe Illustrator or After Effects, we knew that we should stick to 2D animations. We watched videos for inspiration and came up with background patterns and color schemes; our backgrounds are a grey gradient pattern with repeating squares and our floors are a light wood striped gradient. We struggled with keeping the same font, color scheme, scale, and style throughout different scenes, but I think it turned out well in the end once we understood what to do. In After Effects, we learned that our original zoom in idea would not work with every slide, so we tried to vary our transitions. We had to make decisions about which parts of the scenes to animate.

Working with After Effects was hard because many of our animations worked with characters. The way that we made our characters was not condusive to the puppet tool, so we had to be very precise with where we placed the puppet pins

Our main problem was that we spent so much time in Illustrator that we had very little time to animate in After Effects, so we had to stay late one day after NuVu. If we had managed our time a little better, we could have had smoother transitions and more precise animations. 

Overall, I think this project went very well. It was so different seeing the final on the screen and knowing where we had come from to get there. The decisions we made, like our color palette, characters, front view, and animation transitions, helped us to come up with a cohesive video.