What its like doing 2D animation in After Effects.

Now that lovely looking chap there is me… still on my placement and was in full swing of recapping my storyboard for my 2D project for an in-house client. And it’s to basically create a full animated ‘How to’ video which to everyone sounds easy.

Honestly, I now know how they do it so well.

It’s not just by simply creating a composition and getting on with it, it takes a little bit of prep before hand. And this is what I am doing in the photo.

Let’s take a closer Look…

Getting to grips with animation & Motion Graphics.

Since my synoptic pitch I have strongly come to grips with how to use animation and more of the fundamentals such as squash & stretch, composition, anticipation etc.

Wednesday just gone, I was to create a birthday celebration template like that of Facebook’s, but obviously with my own twist.

With my laptop being able to only handle 2d motion graphics, I seemed more comfortable with the task I was given. Firstly I started by setting some placeholders to figure out where the rest of the assets will appear at the end of the animation.

But it’s not just about coming in and starting a piece requested by a client, it’s also following through with the client on a project to make sure their views are being visually shown to their standards. This also links in with Pre-Production and I will touch up on this on another blog relating to the upcoming Synoptic project.

Making scenes come together with context…

A week and a half into this placement and I’m starting to get to grips with how industry is run and how a production pipeline comes together with communication and good teamwork.

The team at ThreeMotion Media have been very helpful and welcomed me as if I was part of the team this past week, the atmosphere is professional and at the same time chilled; personally I think this is a good environment to come into when starting industry.

Today I was to create a 3D animation lasting 5-6 Seconds, this scene was to be turned into a gif then placed into a blog…

Honestly found it tricky believe it or not as I could only place so much into the scene without passing everything too quickly. The first camera was going to be following an arrow as it is shot towards the target in front (which is out of focus), then another camera tracking the arrow on a side orthographic view still heading towards the target. and finally the last camera capturing the arrow piercing the target itself.

Doesn’t sound like too much but when you have to capture the concept on 3 cameras to cover the animation evenly… it becomes a bit hard to stick that on a 5 – 6 second Gif. Just starts to look like a compilation on speed.

I have thought about how to get everything in one sequence and yet extend the time but keep the requirements. Yes it sounds weird but maybe it’s because I over-complicate things.

Maybe I could create all three scenes and have their times set to about 10-15 seconds and use advanced speed scrubbing to slowly speed up the video in the least important parts.