Animal Project — Part 3 (Animation)
Lab Spring 2021
3.29 — Storyboarding
4.6 — First Pass
Notes
- Color shift when importing illustrator components into after effects?
- Waves “warp” too similarly, create some variation
Feedback:
- Curve the camera movement, “zoom-out” from title sequence to foreground cliff is too static
4.8 — Second Pass
Questions:
- How to fix colors in ae
- How to make wave position movement more fluid
- How to curve the “camera” movement
4.9 — In Person Work Session
Friday with Q and Danny
It was actually much harder to get the fluid camera movement than I thought it would be. Originally, I’d done a simple scale change with the anchor point in the corner of the screen, but to change the position, I had to move the anchor point back to the middle. When I did this, the position and scale no longer moved together, so there were frames where the background moved off the screen.
Weekend: Making more components for the frame-by-frame bird movements
Note: when I put the pair frames into after effects and played it through, every other frame was brighter so that the animation flashed,,, HOW TO FIX
4.13 — Feedback:
Add zoom out scene to fit the “lonely” mood of the colors, emphasize the story about it being “just the two of them”.
I thought I could simply add more/expand my background for the last scene (above middle photo), but it looked awkward and it was hard to put it into the context of a larger cliff background without the perspective looking off. So, I re-made the background (above right)
- I also thought I might try adding a burst of wind at the end to add to the “loneliness” of the ending (trim path effect!)
4.14 To Do:
- Fix the waves to look more natural
- Animate the rest of the bushes
- Brainstorm, record sounds
- Fix glitch:(
4.15 — Sounds
waves: sliding paper on wooden desk
pop: mouth sound effect courtesy of Danny Cho
“?” sound when the puffin cocks its head: me
puffin sound: me
walking: masking tape on cloth (aka my jeans)
bushes or components moving/sliding: wave sound, cut short
wind: me blowing into the phone
beaks kissing: tapping a water bottle cap
- Animating bushes
- Fixing the glitch
Danny helped me fix the flashing glitch earlier in the day, but then it came back at 11:30 right as I was actually finishing up the final video with all its components. So, I had to delay the submission by a day:(
4.16 —
Today a glitch-fix that I thought would take 30 minutes, tops, turned into a 4 hour trouble-shooting session. One thing would work and then it would mess something else up, or a problem would resurface, or I would export and notice something that didn’t show up in the work space, or the color was wrong so I had to export color tests with adjustment layers, but then something else would go wrong in the middle of that and then I’d be back to square one. T.T
I think the reason why this project was so hard for me was because there was so much time spent on fixing software issues and glitches that I feel like I shouldn't have had to run into, as compared to the actual time creating the animation. I think I spent a total of at least 6 hours fixing issues like glitches, color shifts, etc. and I feel like it was frustrating because I felt that the final result didn’t reflect the amount of work and time that went into the project because I spent so much time simply trying to make it possible, rather than being able to use that time and energy to actually improve the quality of the animation itself. And there were things that I wanted to do — make the bushes move a certain way, or make the camera movements more smooth — that I wasn’t really 100% satisfied with at the end and I was kind of frustrated at Adobe that I couldn’t actually make what I wanted to make because of software issues and Adobe’s design. Anyway, perhaps even that is all a part of the design process as well,,
I don’t know if I can say that this was my favorite thing I’ve ever made, but I’m still proud of the final result, I think it’s a cute little story and it was a really good learning experience.
Things I Learned:
- After Effects is hard and difficult to learn, but I can do it! Learning curve overcome:)
- Telling a compelling story in 20 seconds is harder than I thought
- Sound design is really cool!
- Unfortunately, software issues and glitches are simply an unavoidable part of design:’)
