The idea for this project originated around a small entre-acte on a Regina Spektor album:  a short whispered dialogue between Regina and a younger girl, the track is called “Whisper”.  I thought it would be charming to animate this dialogue, using kinetic text and motion graphics in After Effects.  Since the theme is about waiting and impatience, I started using images of clocks.  I found several source images, pulled them into Photoshop to edit them, then began animating movement and scenes.  The clock theme evolved as I got great images of clock hands and gears.  This was the perfect opportunity to use After Effects expressions, like linking relative movement between the hands of a clock face (parenting to another layer, then multiplying its rotational value).  A frequent expression that I used was Spin:

// Spin (rotate at a constant speed without keyframes)
veloc = 50; //rotational velocity (degrees per second)
r = rotation + (time – inPoint) *veloc;
[r]

For the soundtrack, I used the track “Whisper” from Regina’s album Soviet Kitsch, then added sound effects to create an entire sound design for this imaginary world of tiny gears and clockworks.  I edited the soundtrack in Adobe Audition, then combined everything back into After Effects for the final rendered video.