Here’s an optical illusion I recreated from an Instagram Reel which I have since lost! I’m sorry to the original designer! I will update this as soon as I figure out who uploaded the original! It is not my design but i thought it was so cool that I’d break it down for you.
Designed in Illustrator and taken into After Effects. All possible through the one and only Overlord Plugin from Battleaxe.
If you look closely at the animation, you’ll notice that there are two moving states:
A pair of semi-circles rotate 180 degrees.
An 8 pointed blue star appears in the gap between and rotates 90 degrees.
Let’s get into the project breakdown!
Here are the four elements that make this possible.
Top Left: Core Unit.
Two semi-circles facing away from each other in a blue square. The pair is the first moving unit. It will rotate 180 degrees for the first moving state of the animation
Top Right: Core Tile
Each pair of semi-circles is placed on the border of each side. You can see that the negative space between all four pairs is beginning to form.
Bottom Left: Clean Plate Background
Once the negative space shape begins to rotate, it needs this clean plate to maintain the illusion
Bottom Right: Negative Space
This is the second moving unit,
The core tile!
So here’s the illusion. Those four pairs of semi-circles rotates 180 degrees. Then a new shape is built from the negative space in the centre of the frame.
Negative space is defined as the space in a gap between objects. This illusion plays with the idea of it. Especially how your eye recognises negative space.
Sure it doesn’t look so impressive here, but get the right background colour and repeat it a bunch of times and you’ll see it!
I’ve arranged the tiles in a pattern here. Four larger tiles and 9 smaller tiles to fill in the gap.
I placed it in a larger comp, reduced the size by 50% and added the CC Repetile effect. This repeated horizontally and vertically until the whole frame was covered.
You can also see an expression that Loops the video.
When you’re designing a perfectly looping video, you want the first frame to match the last frame - until you want to export it. Then delete the last frame!
This is essential!
If you don’t delete the last frame, you’ll have two identical frames in a row.