NATURE'S NEEDLEWORK

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client

Node Festival Melbourne

year

2024

duration

3 Months

location

Melbourne, Australia

overview

Nature's Needlework was my entry for the 2024 Node Ident Competition, with the theme of Australian and New Zealand flora and fauna. The piece was inspired by my grandma’s embroidered artworks, which capture Aotearoa’s landscapes stitch by stitch.

Reimagining her embroidery in motion gave me a new appreciation for her craft, every thread and texture had to be considered. The animation was made entirely in After Effects, using a painstaking process of layering cloth textures over shape layers to mimic the depth and imperfections of physical stitches.

Seeing it play on the big screen at The Capitol in Melbourne was an unforgettable experience.

approach

My grandma’s embroidery pieces were my main source of inspiration.

Looking at her work, and countless other embroidery pieces online, I was fascinated by the level of detail in every individual thread: how the light catches each one differently, and how tiny shadows form between the stitches. Translating that texture and dimensionality into a digital medium was a real challenge, but it became the foundation of the piece.

Each scene began as a flat styleframe, which I rebuilt as shape layers directly in After Effects. Using Auto-Trace, I converted each shape into detailed outlines, then applied the Scribble effect to simulate the look of individual embroidery threads. To bring depth and texture to the piece, I overlaid a cloth fabric texture on top of each layer and adjusted it to interact naturally with the scribble lines.

From there, I fine-tuned the colour, shading, and highlights using a combination of blending modes and adjustment layers. Finally, I added grain, noise, a subtle vignette, and soft shadows to make the piece feel like a physical canvas resting against the background.