Fraser River Animation | rewildingVancouver 2014

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Fraser River Animation
the Mapping of BC’s Fraser River | spring 2014
artist × designer collab.

With respect to our local waterways and through on-going collective effort in protection of British Columbia’s waterscapes, Vancouver residents are always looking for ways to help improve the overall health of our environment.

In collaboration with Visual Artist Karisa Evdokimoff, my role as Communication Designer was to assist in finding a way to bring a river sketch to motion.

Lucky me, the Artist provided:

a photo she took with which I could use for the backdrop

a bird's-eye view photograph of the Fraser River taken at sweeping heights

All I had to do was give it a crop to have it fit a video format of a 16:9 aspect ratio at the HDTV-resolution of 720p × 1080p.

to-scale sketches

the river

the province of BC

here it is prepped and traced.

with thanks to google images, a google image search was all that was needed in assuring line-art consistency between atlas / modern –day BC

this is custom lettering courtesy of Karisa

live trace sketch-to-vector in Illustrator

Core digitization process:

shown below are regional markers (the font is FF DIN) used in pinpointing locations via which the Fraser River travels through

I made these markers with adobeIllustrator.
in motion, you'll notice they were made to pop

yep, those dots we see on maps

Animating the River

OK let’s fast forward past the strenuous unveiling of masked paths accomplished through:

• utilization of the AfterEffects mask-reveal tool;
• combined with keyframe interpolation;
• and coordination of river path to match pop-up of location labels

and instead, have you enjoy it within context of Karisa’s wonderful video piece (river animation starts its journey at one-minute in) :