Pelé: The Autobiography
Animated Book Trailer
Concept
The objective of my work is to provide a brief overview of Pelé's life by displaying the transition he makes from living in poverty to becoming one of the world's greatest soccer player. My trailer begins with Pelé as a young boy playing soccer in his impoverished hometown. Young Pelé kicks his homemade soccer ball off the screen and into the air, panning over the sky. Once the ball goes through a cluster of clouds, it transforms into a real soccer ball. This scene is the leading signifier of Pelé's transition in his life and soccer career. Next, the real soccer ball will fall, landing in a stadium where adult Pelé is playing with Brazil professionally. Once the ball reaches Pelé, he will kick the ball directly into the camera view and once entirely white, revealing the book title and author.
My target audience consists of all soccer fans wanting to get insights on Pelé's life, especially all the hardships he faced to obtain his successful soccer career. In my trailer, I incorporated aspects of Pelé's performance, including his flawless dribbling and powerful shot. These elements represent what Pelé is most recognized for in the game of soccer. Utilizing his most noteworthy skills in the game will spark interest with all soccer fans, and because of his global presence, reach fans worldwide. Additionally, I am also targeting young aspiring soccer players. Without a doubt, Pelé's story can provide younger generations with valuable lessons from his life's hardships. By younger audiences reading about the evolution of Pelé's soccer career, it can spark passion and motivate them to pursue their current ambitions. My design addresses this segment of my target audience when Pelé is playing soccer as a child with a handmade soccer ball. Additionally, Henrique's motives for his work inspired me to utilize each frame in my trailer, especially the sky scene, to portray emotions such as compassion, anticipation and fulfilment, thus representing Pelé's evolution of his life. The young Pelé and sky scenes are significant in tapping into younger generations inside the world's soccer community.
Target
Audience
Inspiration
Development
Software Used
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Procreate: Rough Sketches
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Adobe Illustrator: Built all assets used within the trailer
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Adobe After Effects: Used to create the motion graphic and animate all assts
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Westar: Downloaded royalty free background music and sound effects
I anticipated that I would struggle with the movement of Pelé kicking the ball. The movement of young Pelé was a lot of trial and error in the leg and shadow positioning and null object camera movement. Watching YouTube videos of real soccer ball kicks helped me overcome positioning challenges. The most significant challenges I faced were in the sky scene. After applying the positioning and wiggle expression to each cloud with various coordinates and animating the soccer balls, the scene's last animation step was the camera movement. But once I enabled the 3D effect on each layer, it rearranged each layer, making many clouds disappear. After trying to troubleshoot the problem myself through research and various positioning trials in AE and finding no solution, I contacted Adobe technical support. I found out that the wiggle was causing the layers to move, so I had to separate each expression's dimensions, delete the z-value and rearrange each cloud in my view 2-horizontal panel. Many of the other challenges I faced, such as camera movement, ball positioning and Pelé animation, took timely trial and errors to reach satisfaction in my animation.