Re-Upload (original date: 11/18/2021)
Over the past week, I went back and finished up my Video
Animation that I started in school. Using Adobe After Effects, I put
together all the digital images I had made during school
and finished up all the scenes I had planned. Most of the process was
straight-forward, I found, I had very few instances
where I had to learn something new to continue.
Some of the interesting points during development included:
- Adding the looping flame effect. I ended up using two
duplicated layers, that were offset, and looping them back to the
beginning when they reached the edge. I also had to draw
a new image for the flames, which I scanned and traced over in GIMP.
- Generally, just how long it can take to make an
animation, even when you know what you’re doing, have everything planned
out,
and have all of your images already done.
- There is a lot of math involved if you want things to
be smooth. It’s all basic math, but it is frequent. Math like counting
frames, counting pixels, figuring out relative scaling,
and just planning around how long you want things to last in frames.
I enjoyed working on this animation. I’d like to make
something more complex in the future, with actual frame-based animation
(like a walk cycle – drawing multiple frames), instead
of just mostly changing the position/scale/rotation of a single image.
It would be best, though, to get more experienced
drawing directly digitally on a tablet, rather than drawing by hand,
then
scanning, then tracing, as this takes pretty long and
would really add up if I have to do a lot of frames for a short
animation.
Otherwise, Adobe After Effects itself is nice to use.
It’s an effective program overall. I just am not in love with the
Adobe pricing model and would rather just use an open
source tool. Blender has some 2D animation tools and I would be looking
toward that next for any animation I’d like to do.