Studio Brief 3 Evaluation

During the first After Effects workshops my god my head was frazzled. I was pretty daunted once they were over at the thought of making my own animation with this software. It did take me a while to get my head around it, I'm still very new to any type of software, so it took me a day of just playing around and reading the meticulous notes I'd made in the sessions for fear of forgetting the simplest of things.

I really enjoy taking the learning as you go approach and just accepting things going wrong as a way of moving forward although I didn't really leave myself enough time to enjoy that without getting stressed out as my publication took me so long to finish! I definitely could have done more storyboarding although as I was pushed for time once I had the idea in my head I just ran with it.

The worst part was separating the layers out. I'm really slow and very basic when it comes to Photoshop so it took me ages to separate out my layers, especially for the part with the jars as I wanted the people and the stuff in the jars to all move separately. I was going crazy with all the "jar 4" "person 5" "fizz for jar 3" layer names. Photoshop did really come in handy for sections like the falling man. I took this motif from my lino print of the person in the river and then with the opacity on layers I made 3 other drawings so I could play them one after the other to make the falling person seem more realistic than a static lump of limbs.

I'm really interested in spending more time with moving pictures, it can add a great extra dimension to your images. Even simply adding the music created such an atmosphere within the moving illustrations. I feel a lot more confident with the software now, especially the way of working of creating Pre-compositions which i could then paste into the main composition, allowing my brain to get less frazzled with 50830 layers open at once. The ability to zoom in and out of a composition where elements are moving inside is something I always thought was super complex and had to be created with meticulous frame by frame drawing but in actual fact it was much easier than I thought and adds a really immersive dimension.

I'd like to experiment more with frame by frame animation in combination with key frames. I'm drawn to the analogue way of making frames using the light box and being able to create moving textures with analogue media. For example the second animation on my inspiration blog post https://c-mceniff1720-sp.blogspot.com/2018/12/moving-image-inspiration.html has a beautiful fluid quality to it, using hand drawn frames in conjunction with whole frame movements. Fred showed us a great compilation video of some infinite zoom animations - definitely something I want to work towards making.

I think if I spent longer on this animation I could have done a better job, although I'm proud of myself for creating something completely new for me and it looking the slightest bit professional!



Final Sting - Arundhati Roy from Cait McEniff on Vimeo.