Sophia Westrop portfolio - Project page

For this project, I created the identity for a skincare company called Elin cosmetics, as well as promotional content for the brand.

I enjoy skincare routines a lot, so I decided I wanted to focus on skincare products rather than makeup. I wanted to do an all-natural brand with a positive connection between nature and beauty, hence the slogan "beautiful by nature". The hope was to not only put emphasis on the natural ingredients, but also draw a connection to natural beauty and help the consumer feel beautiful just the way they are.

I felt a connection to a butterfly for this brand as I was brainstorming logos, so the orange butterfly in the final logo design ended up becoming a continuous theme in the content for the assignment. I used Adobe Firefly to generate images of an orange butterfly for the logo animation and video, as well as images of an orange butterfly with various skincare products like lotion. It was too specific to find any stock photos of such a thing, so Adobe Firefly worked perfectly for the job.

One challenge I encountered with this assignment was animating the flock of butterflies in the promotional video. One of my professors helped me try to figure out the best technique to animate the butterfly and he graciously helped me out for about an hour, but unfortunately that technique wasn't compatible with the next steps to creating the flock, if I recall correctly. So, I ended up having to do things in a more tedious way, but it worked out. However, when I did clone the butterfly into a flock, I struggled to get the timing of the wings varied enough and have the butterflies spaced apart just right so there was no clipping.

I also encountered the issue with the alpha texture of the butterflies- there was a thin pixel-y white border around the texture and it took me a few tries to find the right issue and fix. Also with that butterfly, getting the timing and path just right for the logo animation was a little tricky! I fussed with it quite a bit, and then once I was satisfied, the render for it kept coming out crispy. I did a lot of Googling and trial and error with settings until finally, after turning on some GPU-intensive settings, the render came out smooth... after a much longer render time.

I'm really happy with how the video turned out for this assignment more than anything. It was inspired by Korean skincare ads, and I think I got the vibe just right. Between us, I got a perfect grade on the video! I really enjoyed putting it together too. And I guess one would hope so, considering the whole motion designer thing.

I'm also really happy with how my scene displaying the various products and their packaging turned out! Adobe Firefly really saved me there because I struggled to find a stock image that would be just right for the backdrop. The stage it generated was exactly what I needed. Admittedly, I was very apprehensive of AI image generation at first, but I've really discovered what a useful tool it can be.