Tubular Balls

Cavalry is such a versatile and precise piece of software it can take a while to understand its paradigm. It's very different from the way I usually work (either in After Effects or pure JavaScript/SVG/canvas) and the processes through which my mind goes in order to evaluate how I can achieve a certain effect, look or motion have had to undergo some serious reorientation.

And because of this precision it is quite easy to make something that looks pretty cool pretty quickly. But once you delve deeper into the seemingly simple functionalities of, say, the Flatten Shapes Layer (which, as you can imagine, just flattens a layer) or the Skew behaviour (again, it does one thing) you begin to see the complexity they can produce when they operate within the context of other simple elements like oscillators or duplicated layers, each passing different values around based on an almost infinite number of variable properties.

Very quickly the plain and simple can become beautifully complex (and messy if you're not careful!).

It's been a long journey but I am starting to get to the point where I can imagine something, play around trying to achieve it, but end up somewhere else truly wonderful. Ok, not always but the journey is always fun.

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Chris Gannon
Interactive Motion Designer

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