Fairy wanted a video to acknowledge being voted the number one laundry brand for sensitive skin. They had already created a static image for the announcement and wanted that artwork brought to life through animation.

I began by isolating the elements from the original Photoshop file and importing them into After Effects. The most obvious source of motion suggested by the artwork was the patterned shapes sitting behind the products, so I decided to use those as the main driver for the animation. The first step was animating the pattern itself.

This was fairly complex, as the pattern was made up of around 400 individual shapes. Fortunately, I had access to the original vector file, so there was no need to recreate it. I imported the pattern from Illustrator using the Overlord plugin, bringing each shape into After Effects on its own layer. From there, I wrote a script to link all of their movement to a single null object. This null contained two slider controls driving a wiggle effect, with the intensity decreasing over time.

I approached it this way so I could stagger the layers and bring the shapes in at different moments, while keeping the movement behaviour consistent across all of them. Without linking them to a null, the animation would have quickly become messy and inconsistent.

Once the background was working, I moved on to creating a matte for the text. The original pattern had too many gaps to work cleanly, so instead I created a floral, petal-like shape and animated it scaling up from a smaller size. I duplicated this layer across the frame, repeating it vertically and horizontally, and then applied Turbulent Displace to soften it and give it a more organic feel. This helped sell the idea that the text was being revealed by the same petal forms moving through the rest of the animation.

Overall, I was really pleased with how this turned out, particularly given the scale of the setup. Taking hundreds of layers and turning them into something cohesive and visually appealing was a satisfying technical challenge.