Mood Swings

Time Taken: 4 weeks
Role: Lead Animator and Motion Designer
Tools and Software Used: Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Premiere Pro
Brief:
This animation was created to illustrate a character’s journey through intense mood swings, from joy and optimism to sudden sadness and depression. Through vibrant colors, motion graphics, and expressive character animation, it explores how quickly emotions can shift, emphasizing the unpredictable nature of mood swings.
Process, Challenges, and Solutions:
The animation opens with a tranquil scene of the girl looking out her window, surrounded by flowers and holding a cup of tea with gentle smoke rising. The soft, warm tones and subtle details required special attention to lighting and texture in After Effects, creating a welcoming, cheerful start. Achieving this calm yet vivid scene involved layering light filters and subtle movement to bring warmth.
The next sequence uses vibrant motion graphics and colorful, rhythmic shapes and sounds to represent her uplifted mood. Creating a dynamic blend of colors and sounds that perfectly mirrored her mood required extensive use of After Effects, focusing on timing and synchronicity to achieve fluid, upbeat motion. The playful ping pong sounds added an extra layer of joy, but balancing the audio with the visuals to avoid overwhelming the viewer was a challenge. The solution involved testing and refining sound levels in Premiere Pro.
The tone shifts abruptly as the girl's mood changes, marked by her tilting her head in concern, and the sudden appearance of a thundercloud with lightning and rain. This change was tricky to convey smoothly while keeping the animation expressive, so After Effects' lighting effects were used to accentuate the mood shift. The transition from vibrant color to black and white was designed to visually portray the sudden onset of sadness, immersing the viewer in her emotional state.
In the final scenes, the girl appears crying in the corner and lying in bed, gazing blankly at her ceiling, surrounded by a bleak, colorless environment. Stripping down to monochromatic tones was crucial here to represent depression visually. This change posed the challenge of maintaining the animation’s emotional impact while limiting color; shading and shadow work were carefully applied to retain depth and expression.
Target Audience:
Young adults and teens who resonate with visual storytelling about emotional well-being, mental health awareness, and mood changes.
Tutor Feedback:
The feedback highlighted the effective use of colors and sound to convey changing emotions, especially the seamless transition from joy to sadness. Suggestions included exploring more nuanced facial expressions during the mood shift to deepen the emotional impact further and adding subtle animation to her breathing in the final scene for a more immersive feel.