Side Project: Joe Henderson

I've been getting back into After Effects after a few years away with the hope of being able to incorporate more motion design skills into my work. To that end, I've come up with a side project that I'm casually calling "music in motion," where I attempt to use what I'm learning in my Udemy courses to build original, music-related animations. This is the first of who knows how many - maybe 1, maybe 10,000 pieces.

Joe Henderson was a jazz saxophonist on the famous Blue Note Records label, and this is his third album, In 'N Out. Reid Miles was the graphic designer who designed this cover along with hundreds of other covers that gave Blue Note albums their distinct visual feel.

Because this is a motion project and not an illustration project, I worried less about perfectly duplicating the cover. For example, the typography is similar but not precisely the same, and I pulled a different image of Henderson for the dot in the "i" because I couldn't find the real photo at a high enough resolution. Likewise, the signature next to the "T" is just a squiggle I made in Illustrator. This piece was intended to give me practice on basic keyframing concepts, as well as bounce/overshoot animation and speed graph easing control.