By Justine Chahal
When people watch a movie, they may not give the title sequence much thought. An audience may not consider the work that goes into the motion of the font, the way text slides on screen or how the sequence is edited.
Ian Parel, a motion graphic designer in Sacramento with a love for visual effects, considers all of this and more. When he learned about VFX and motion graphic animation, he knew right away that was what he wanted to pursue for a career.
“I didn’t realize there [are] people who do this specifically and not just video,” Parel says. “I dove deeper into that and I think I’ve been exploring this for close to 10 years now for animation and professionally, I’ve done it for four or five years. There’s still stuff that I’m discovering every day.”
When Parel was a child growing up in Santa Clarita, he had explored different creative outlets including photography and drawing alongside his uncle. When he reached high school, however, he began working with video much more.
It was only when he took a motion graphics course at California State University Northridge that his love for the form began, Parel says. His work is oriented around cutting out photographs and animating them, bringing these flat photos to a three-dimensional space.
Parel utilizes Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to create the assets for his work and then animates them using Adobe After Effects. Through these tools and his skill set, he’s been able to help tell various brands’ stories in their advertisements.
He finds the ability to create something from scratch to be rewarding, especially for someone who is naturally curious like himself.
“My brain is very analytical so a lot of the things I look at, I try to break things apart and see how they work,” Parel says. “Being able to do that and manipulate those things and then do them myself, it’s very satisfying to me.”
Parel says he appreciates that his work is so unique but he also considers this quality to be its own double-edged sword. When he goes to networking events, he often finds himself having to explain what he does in great detail for people to understand it fully, adding that when most people hear “animation,” they think of cartoons. Many people don’t understand the depth that the animation field has to offer, Parel says.
However, Parel is glad that his work can add something to a project that other fields can’t. “There’s a lot of places that I can add value to something or, if there’s a graphic designer, I can animate their graphics and make it more than what it was,” Parel says. “I guess just adding to things, being able to add to things, is unique.”
When Parel moved to Sacramento in January 2020 to be closer to his now-wife, he wanted to develop his skill set further and believes he has been able to do so in this city. He wants to work with more Sacramento companies in order to tell their stories.
Parel says his ultimate goal would be to work on the title sequence of a television show or movie, citing the sequences for “Keeping Up with the Joneses” and “Game of Thrones” as inspirational. He also would like to teach motion graphics to others.
“Just being able to give that back to my community of animators would be really nice because there’s so much that this has given me,” Parel says. “For my own creative fulfillment, it would be really cool if I could do that to someone else as well.”