Adobe After Effects is our first step into the world of animation this year. Our very first assignment using After Effects was to animate a bouncing ball. This included individually saving frames in Adobe Illustrator and then importing them into After Effects. Unfortunately, I accidentally saved all of my frames in the wrong color mode, therefore I couldn’t even get them into After Effects, much less animate them. The next time we used After Effects it was to make a motion graphic. This included our name, 5 description words, a picture of ourselves, and a bit of extra flare. The software was relatively easy to use, even though there were billions of mysterious tools scattered across the screen that didn’t seem to do much. The tools I did recognise were the ones that were the same in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, the pen tool, text tool, eraser, etc.
Overall, the layout of After Effects was a bit intimidating, (I felt like a lighting technician or something with all those sliders and buttons!) There were way more different types of keyframes than I thought, anchor points, position, scale, opacity, and so on. I feel like they could have just had one type of keyframe where you adjust whatever you want, but what they did works too. I also wasn't a big fan of the preset timeline length. This was probably easily adjustable, but I didn’t know how and the assignment needed it to be a certain length anyway. But I would still like it better if I could change it as I work, I kept forgetting how much time i had to work with. In the end, - Adobe Illustrator makes animating simple through the use of keyframes. - The preset timeline length is a bit annoying. - It has a lot of similar tools to Photoshop and Illustrator.
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In 2020, we’re starting the year off with animation. I’ve tried making short animations before but am excited to try it out for real. Originally we were going to use the drawing tablets to make our animations, something I was very excited about because it meant that I could actually draw things. But no. It turns out we are NOT using the drawing tablets. They have decided that, despite their functionality in the past, they are going on strike and will not be cooperating with the computers this year. Maybe Mr.B will scare some obedience into them, maybe they’ll decide to retire early, I don’t know. Luckily the drawing tablets have not doomed animation forever. We are instead doing animation using the trusty old mouse and keyboard. Prior to the drawing tablet rebelion, we received a long talk on animation, how it works and how hard it is. Even though the computer has lots of fancy shortcuts to make animation easier, it still takes hours for just a short animation. These features save us the time of having to draw out every single frame (like I would’ve done if I hadn't read the instructions) but you still have to go back and tweak each and every frame, along with saving them all individually. I’m surprised that people have the dedication to create whole animated movies, even if they are getting paid.
After learning about the painstaking hours of work that go into only small amounts of actual animation, I'm surprised that there are so many animated movies and clips out there, I didn’t think people had the patience for that. So, animation, what is it? Animation is when a series of pictures are shown one after the other so fast that it tricks your brain into thinking they are moving. This proves that humans aren’t as smart as we think we are. But that’s ok because if it didn’t trick our brain then we would never have animated movies, and that would be terrible. Overall,
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AuthorMy name is Xiomara Colopy. I am a student at DSA and am currently taking Digital Design and Animation 1 . Categories
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May 2020
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