My learning about the principles of animation has taken longer than expected, but I know that I need to get myself into shape with more aspects of the showreel. Knowing that I have my plan in place is very helpful, and in following tutorials on the principles I'm beginning to plan out many of the animations that will ultimately make up the showreel - hopefully simply by adapting my current animations to suit those plans.
Appeal and Exaggeration
Appeal was the next principle on my list, so I thought it would be fun to make a character out of a simple vector. It started off as a wee square that was going expand in size with some wee lines coming off it to show emotion (?), then I thought it would bring more personality if the wee square were t to roll across some hills to make an entrance - but in making it roll I wanted to make my life a little easier, so I rounded off the corners and that'll help me to make it show rotation without the trouble I had with square at the beginning of Week 6. I think I'll transform it back into a square later, then do the scaling up to show various changes, thus giving more opportunities for the character to show personality.
I've utilised a few different tutorials across this task, one for animating along a path (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nvt-G7uwJ4A) and one for trim paths (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfSrW4W1sK0&t=235s) - these are both things I have done in the past but needed a little reminder on.
I was animating the ball coming to rest in between the two hills, then realised that this was the exact same motion as the pendulum I made last week - so I brought that composition in and midway through the big hill transition from one to the next. I'm very proud of that.
Finally, I added some small motion lines for the ball taking off from the hill and then bumping back down to the ground - I still struggle to see these as good due to my judgemental Creator's Eye (I'm going to trademark that), but these little things also take Exaggeration into account, so I'm getting to a point with these principles where they all overlap.
This is definitely looking better by the day, and I'm definitely falling out of love with animating a character - there are so many bits and tweaks, and I'm unsure which ones are time well spent and which ones are superfluous, which can be pretty frustrating. I'm happy with most of the process, though. I rebuilt my key frames from the jumping square I made two week ago, it felt good not to just copy it, but in hindsight there's no shame in reusing my own work, but I'm calling it reps for now, so it's not a bad thing. Adding in the blur was a big win for me - it's not perfect, but I think it does the job. I'll need to ask people in college tomorrow. Finally, the clouds from the square landing aren't amazing. My plan is to round them off and simplify them further tomorrow morning before class starts, then I'll ask Rebecca and Helen where best to focus my attention for the next three weeks.
With a quick rewatch, I'm happy about more of this than I thought. The movement isn't as jerky as I was fearing, and the movement exaggerations are generally doing their job (but may be a little quick). I'm amazed at how this really started as a task to make a wee square grow in order to show appeal through its cuteness, but I'm now incorporating 3D space, speed, overlap, etc, etc, very naturally. I guess all this learning is working.
I'm much more comfortable adding in wee things and trying to ignore my Creator's Eye as much as possible. In order to get the smoke for the impact I just borrowed an asset from the internet and modified it to make it easier to animate. It's much better than my drawn smoke, and this isn't a big enough thing to spend hours working on - it's a secondary action (ANIMATING JARGON!) so I'm not going to get hung up on it. Casual throwing in of trim paths is becoming a thing, as well as referring to previous work to get things done. I'm going to make the square whizz out now, maybe get some sound effects from Dave's lecture this afternoon, then I'm done with principles and going full tilt into Showreel Sections.
Once completing this, I recognised that I'd become too caught up with the Principles, and I was now at a point where every animation I made was applying upwards of four principles - so I'm going to say that the learning has sunk in here.
Taking this information, I returned to my plan of attack and started to jot down how I wanted to execute certain parts of the video. While I did not get far with this, it did give me the push to start making sections of the video.
Kinetic Type - Revisited
In order to get myself in gear, I went back to finish off the Call of the Abyss animation. Despite resetting my abilities in actual animation, the plan of having the internal, jagged text bursting through the clean serif font would take too long. This is annoying, as I really like the idea of it, but I need to be realistic about what will exemplify a range of skills, rather than one cool skill repeated across 14 letters.
With this in mind, I'm going back to changing the paths, point-by-point to "react" with a lowering water level.
NOTE TO SELF: CHOOSE A COLOUR PALETTE.
To make this liquid effect significantly smoother, I learned about the use of wiggle paths - an incredibly handy tool that will make my shape seem to flow much more naturally, and as it goes down step by step I'm able to shift points on my text to adapt directly.
The aim is to make it seem as though the nice font in the goo becomes all horrid when it comes into contact with the air. I really like how it's turned out so far, especially the way that the word 'Abyss' seems to bulge in the liquid as it changes.
If I get the chance, I think coming back to add a few drips of goo coming off the letters (maybe pooling in the C or O) would be super cool, but I'm definitely putting that in the 'if we have time' category - for now I'm super chuffed with how this has turned out.
What Would Ashleigh Robertson Do?
Back to my current design inspiration, I watched Ashleigh's showreel and took timestamps from it. I think I expected I'd just copy her timeline exactly, but what I've mostly taken away from it is the time it takes for transitions to be effective. And so, I started working on transitions.
So, I went full-tilt fanboy and just copied Ashleigh's liquid transitions. I spent days copying bits her exact transition, point by point along the path of the liquid. This took up two days, and at no point did it look as good as hers. I think - nay, know - my problem is that there's borrowing, there's stealing and then there's plagiarism. I was going for the latter, literally tracing over her work and thinking it would work out. I wasn't using the same techniques as she did, I was drawing over her work frame by frame, with no knowledge of how she had achieved her results. I was putting the Vitruvian Man on a lightbox and trying to redraw it with a sharpie. I've uploaded these videos below, but it's clear that this is not the way to go.
Ashleigh's use of liquid transition from her showreel, available at http://ashleighrobertson.com
Wiggle Paths To The Rescue
This is a much more fun way of doing things, I just made a mad shape, applied a wiggle path, and then played around with the position so it would wave over the screen. With a few tweaks to points along the path, the wiggle path lets it flow consistently without being so frame-by-frame jerky - there's definitely a chance this will work out.
Secondary Motion, Y'all
Them principles have sunk in. I wanted to add in some drips to give the water a more realistic look as it sloshes around, so I simply drew in and animated a few droplets that would emphasises the speed of the wave and show that there is lots at play within (what is essentially) a big amorphous blob that doesn't do much.
I'm not 100% happy with the speed of the wave, but that's a detail I'm happy to get to in my final polish.
In the Summer I learned about trim paths. I had used them to sketch out a few things, and so when it came to redrawing this chair I was able to apply what I'd learned. It was a hand-drawn sketch that I digitised, in the process I outlined the strokes.
When trying to create the drawing effect the fill was stretched across the image and it looked super accidental. Somehow, through my process of adapting the source vector and hoping for the best, I've managed to hit some kind of sweet-spot with the animation and it looks bloody brilliant.
Over-zealously I've applied more wiggle paths on the background lines of the blueprint paper, but it's more effective than having it just fade into the blue.
Patterns. Or not.
I set this up to have the orange come across the screen, used the repeated to have lots of them, and was really happy with the way it looked. Then I thought "Hey, they're clockwork, I can make the handles on them spin in 3D space, pre-comp the handles and oranges together, then repeat them!'
I couldn't. Making the asset 3D meant that I couldn't apply the repeater (at least not in the way I was used to), so I had to just duplicate the pre-comp and have them look like they were repeating.
But it was fun when I realised that them going off the edge of the pre-comp meant I could make it look like they were all going through their own wee doors.
I got a little bit excited around this time, and I'd seen Rebecca just casually dragging comps from other files into After Effects and was learning how longer-form videos should be put together. So I've done that, and for a day or so, it made me feel like I was on the road to making some good things happen. Now, I'm more than aware it's not perfect, so feel free to watch this while bearing in mind that I've had a chat with my tutor about the following:
1 - the oranges are slow, but could benefit from some text above them (I'd considered making a neon sign using an old logo I'd made, but it wasn't working out)
2- the door zoom is a little slow
3 - the water droplets are not yet perfect
4 - the transition away from the chair is a little quick, and more could be shown on this cool blueprint paper.
Patterns and Expressions
After losing my repeater with the oranges, I wanted to go full tilt into it. I had originally thought I'd use the triangles and circles from my title sequence, but we're not allowed to use animations from both projects - which makes sense. So I went back to my research, back to my inspirations. Beginning at the Morning Show I thought simple circles will help me exemplify the actual technique being used, then going further back to Dr No, Maurice Binder's onslaught of circles that spawned 50 years of repeating patterns at the top of Bond films.
Advice from: https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/why-does-ae-s-repeater-effect-fade-in-repetitions-how-can-i-prevent-the-fade-in/td-p/13004464
Working from the bottom up here, I built the white dots and raised the repeater number every few frames. In order to eliminate the fade between iterations I had to do a quick change each time, instructing one circle to appear, leave a few frames, input the same number again, skip just one frame, add one iteration, then repeat.
For the blue, I started with I used the expression "Math.floor(8)" after following an Adobe Help thread and mistaking the word "value" to mean 'put your value in here'. This made all 8 iterations appear at the start, and I just changed the position to grow the snake from 1 to 8.
The red one is closest to what I wanted from the white - one by one circles appearing. But the interim fade was super annoying. So I spoke to Rebecca who explained a little more about how expressions can be very useful, as they let you tell After Effects exactly what to do, but it's essentially coding. The good thing about this is that most animators are not shy about sharing and crediting the work they use, so you can often find exactly what you need by asking the right question.
The yellow is the right answer to the right question. But this time, rather than me thinking I should type '8' rather than 'value', I followed the instructions and typed 'value'. And it works perfectly.
I am happy.
I'm now having fun with repeaters and expressions.
Essentially, I want to take inspiration from so much of the Dr No titles, but I need to work on my pacing so I'll see what I can do. I feel that this example is fast and exciting, but there may be a little too much going on - especially towards the end.
Now, this next version of it - tiny changes in some keyframes, having the red dots run out towards the top - what a work of bloody art. So good, you'll get to watch it thrice!
SLIGHT DETOUR INTO THE WORLD OF AUDIO GREATNESS.
Not only is this cool, it is now all pixelated and cool! I think if I go too far down this road I'll be wasting time (as in, this is 14 seconds long, which is too much time in a 60 second video) - also, the tutorial I was following makes thing pixelated, and I'm already using self-made pixel art and a pixelated font, so I think it's something like having a dog and barking yourself. Still, I've just spent half an hour on it, so I'm showing it here.
Thankfully, further pixelation doesn't detract from the look. In future, now that I know about this effect, I'll utilise it in a more planned-out manner. As it is, I'm happy with how this all comes together.