I started with a really rough sketch on paper. Redrew it in procreate to clean up and plan a bit better what I wanted to do.

Then I started refining the background in illustrator. I created one layer of each continuous line of animation so I could overlap them later.

Once I had everything in place I made some really rough timing/ pacing tests in after effects. Character animation to see how fast each line or characters should go. I used 2/4/6/8 seconds as a framework for length, so I knew that could seamlessly loop everything. (If that didn’t make sense I can explain it better). Then I went to on to refine that part.

I created one cycle (one character going from start to end) and used an effect called echo to repeat it with a second between each. Since the characters are all the same, most animations only needed one second to loop, and create the illusion of endless repeats.

When all the loops were created I combined them in one image which became the finished result.