Animation

Oliver Sacks Sting from Alice Franklin on Vimeo.

After Effects

I finished my animation today and i am really pleased with it, I had taken time getting all of my elements together, the music, the drawings and i wrote out the text for it as well. Overall, i think it looks really good, you can definitely see that it goes with my prints as it has all the elements of my screen prints and the mono print. It also goes to the music, i took a lot of care making sure that the pieces of the animation went to the music after we had the storyboarding session with Fred, as he pointed out what a difference it would make, and i think it does!

I kept it simple, like i wanted too and I really enjoyed the experience of making it. I have felt confident with After Effects as i tried hard in the sessions to take good notes as technology doesn't come very easily to me. After i finished, i actually realised that i quite enjoyed making it and it would be something i would look forward to using again, if i get the opportunity.

After Effects - Part 4

In the last session of After Effects we were taught how to use multiple layers and keyframes, using images in photoshop and different layer sizes.

This Image has three different layers and all of them are different sizes and some are bigger than the composition, which is something to consider when i am doing my animation as it can make a big difference and is really simple and time affective.

The 'Toggle hold Keyframe' is really useful, by clicking on the second keyframe and using this, it holds the position so there is no chance of it changing the property of the keyframe.

The toggle hold keyframe is really useful e.g. this raindrop moves down (like a raindrop) but to make it repeatedly fall without After Effects automatically joining up the middle sod the keyframes, it now just does one movement of going from the top to the bottom.

Duplicating a layer is also really handy and a quick way of making a more skilled looking animation, for instance, i can copy and paste the same rain drop layer with the same keyframes and just change the size and frequency of drops and repeat again and again to make a full rain cloud.

when adding music or sound into After Effects, make sure to preview it on QuickTime Player first and make a note of what section of the audio you want to use.

If you click twice on the audio, it will then open in its own panel and you can edit it down to what ever section you want to use in your animation, then return to your composition and you can edit it even more there.

You can also apply keyframes to audio swell, changing the volume etc. and by using the waveform you can create keyframes for other layers to go in time with the music.

To group together layers so you can move them etc. and then using the parent column, attach layers to the name of the layer you want to parent.

I found this lesson really helpful, i now feel like i know enough to be able to go and create my animation, but also now i can plan my animation knowing what i can do it, which help me prepare my illustrations to go with it.

After Effects - Part 3

In part 3 of the After Effects workshop, we were shown more short cuts that we can use to help us along with our animations and also some useful tools and effects that we can use to make a simple animation look a lot more intricate than it seems.

For a photoshop image, with different layers, to import into After Effects and manipulate each layer differently and retain the size of each layer, you should import as 'Composition-retain layer sizes'

To be organised, file - dependencies - collect files - save as, this collects all files and images and puts in one folder so it is all together.

This is the 'Shy switch', if you want to work on a particular layer you can use this and it will hid the others to simplify the layers.

This is the 'Continuously rasterise tool', this works well on vector images, when scaling up, press this button and and the lines will sharpen up.

We also looked at brightness and contrast which is good to use as an effect in your work.

This is the 'Adjustment layer' tool, this can be used to adjust the hue and saturation 

After Effects Part 2

For our second session in After Effects, we leaned some useful shortcuts to use which will make using loads of keyframes for different layers a lot easier. We also had a play about important files from Photoshop and making a composition with numerous layers move.

We also learnt about the importance of guidelines in After Effects as there is a guide for text and a guide for images, this makes sure that when it is viewed on screen, nothing with be cut off.