AOPS ONLINE CLASSROOM
Role: Creative Direction Motion Design, 3D Animation, 3D Modelling
Company: Art of Problem Solving
Published: 2023
AoPS Online is not just an online chatroom where hard mathematics is discussed. It is a community. It is a teaching system designed around a central hierarchy (as opposed to a top-down one) where the professor’s influence stimulates student discussion with the purpose of encouraging refined patterns of thinking.
In this focused, digital space, students avoid distractions and become numbers, thoughts, connections, and fractals that form a world-wide web of learning. Eventually, the knowledge that is moderated by the teachers and gathered by these student minds will ripple out to serve the world and society at large in solving its most pressing problems.
This sort of grand vision forms the image of a harmonious, interconnected fractal in which the smallest particles bind to create the biggest changes.
THE PIPELINE
This was my first time ever messing around with Blender. Every particle, nebulae, and angle of geometry was my first attempt at both experimenting with a program, and figuring out a timeline that worked well with After Effects. Like any other animation, we started off with an idea of what we wanted to build, and then I proceeded to creating the world in which that idea lived in. Once that world was built, I could go in and take any camera angle I'd want.
SKETCH & STORYBOARD
When thinking about the metaphysical space in which this online classroom was going to live in, I thought of grand geometry out in space - a fractal that changed it shape as it grew more connections between the students inhabiting it. I began to draw the fractal from different angles - thinking both of the immaterial space it inhabited, and the material reality which the students lived in represented by live action pictures.
You can think of this as The Matrix - the students are the embodiment of the reality which is seen while the fractal geometry is the web that connects all of them via virtual space.
BUILDING THE UNIVERSE
The main challenge in this build was it was heavy in terms of rendering power. I had to find a way to work with as many particles as possible while also being practical about my GPU usage. Luckily, Blender's EVEE renderer proved to be great for quick processing and editing, and it allowed me to replicate a lot of building blocks to create the simulation of space.
I began by building a procedural nebulae environment via Blender's node editor, doing the same with the star-like mesh seen between the clouds. Once built, I took our company logo and transformed it into it's 3D variant, essentially turning it into an optical illusion which looked like our logo on the front, and a parallelogram on the side. I then modelled a web over it of crisscrossing cyan lines, which represented the logo in it's metaphysical form - almost like the spirit of the glyph itself.
Once those pieces were established, I began to animate the sequence, which starts with the logo being formed, and ends with it detonating into a supernova, spreading knowledge to everyone caught in its rays.
2D MEETS 3D
Upon finishing the main sequence, I rendered every channel separately so that I had a wide range of control when compositing everything in After Effects. I also downloaded a series of liquid videos from Getty Images, and used those as overlays for transitions. This represented the organic, intangible element found between the students - their thoughts, knowledge, memories, community, and friendships built in the Online school. Once the main sequence was composited, I spliced together a soundtrack to tie everything together.
SOCIAL DELIVERY
Once our main sequence was compositied, rendered, and approved, I began to make social cut downs for advertising on our main Meta Pages. The final results were then tracked by our data analyst, and A/B tested to further increase our CTR and ROI ratios.
The ads seen below were specifically made to advertise our Online classes in preparation for Advanced Math Contest happening later that year.
CREDITS
Creative Director: Nestor Tomaselli
VP of Marketing: Eric Olsen
Marketing Lead: Katlin Chadwick
Curriculum Directors: Deven Ware, Christie Harrison