The Trapcode Experiments series is exactly what it sounds like - a personal project designed to improve my understanding of the powerful After Effects plugin suite, Trapcode. Each piece is inspired by a piece of music, which is also used to drive the animation of the visuals. The workflow is very short (usually a matter of hours from start to finished render); essentially, a visual concept is sketched out and then animated by linking different properties with the musical source in different ways. In my opinion, not all of these are particularly interesting or successful, but they were enjoyable to create. It remains a fun workflow process since it produces results so rapidly. In addition, learning about this plugin system led to some experiments with writing my own particle and mesh based animation systems, and this research has provided a solid foundation for much of my more recent work.
