creative muscle memory
- Elise Jolie
- May 8
- 2 min read
somewhere along the way over the last few years, i think i forgot how important it is to nurture your creative side outside of work. creativity is something you have to practice — not just technically, but emotionally too. learning how to actually communicate an idea or feeling the way it exists in your head takes time, experimentation, and honestly a lot of trial and error.
i’ve always loved vfx, motion graphics, and immersive visual storytelling, but in a lot of my previous roles i got so caught up in the day-to-day cycle of email marketing, web management, content calendars, resizing graphics 40 different ways, and designing within the same brand systems over and over, that i slowly stopped creating things just because i wanted to make them.
so this year i’m trying to intentionally make more space for that again. more experimenting, more learning, more “what happens if i try this” energy. not everything needs to be perfectly optimized or strategically tied to a campaign to be valuable. sometimes it’s enough to just make something because it feels exciting.
this little 13 second animation took me… an embarrassingly long amount of time 😭 mostly because i became irrationally committed to getting these floating digital cameras to wobble correctly in 3d space. i had such a specific feeling in my head for how i wanted the movement to look that i fully disappeared into after effects for like three hours trying to make tiny png cameras behave naturally.
the concept itself was actually pretty simple: i took a bunch of old visuals and graphic work i’ve created over the years, layered them into these digital camera frames, spread them throughout a 3d environment, animated a camera moving through the space, then added particles, lighting, depth, and all the extra cinematic details to make it feel more immersive.
also i’ve officially become the kind of person who gets way too excited about particle systems. if there’s an opportunity to add floating atmospheric dust to something, unfortunately i will be taking it.
is this the greatest thing i’ve ever made? definitely not lol. but i had fun making it, i learned a lot in the process, and for the first time in a while i felt creatively challenged in a way that reminded me why i started loving this stuff in the first place.
every
time I tell myself "just be creative" - all i hear is that Don't Hug Me I'm Scared" guy with the "green is not a creative color!"
but heck yeah it is!
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