My Name Animation

So far, e9 has been a great learning experience. I've grown in many aspects of all the courses offered- film, graphic design, and animation. I definitely would not have been capable to learn these things on my own. All the teachers truly care about and are well educated in their field. The things we learn are very elemental, however extremely useful as a strong basis to develop skills with. All the projects have been creative and enjoyable.

Based off of all the experiences I've had this year, I believe next year I aspire to delve further into web design and video. Those two focus areas were the most enjoyable for me; I felt as though I could efficiently work, and dually have a creative outlet for my ideas. The other two, graphic design and animation, were entertaining, however they are not what I'd desire to do as an occupation for a long period of time.

Keyframe Animation

In this project, we created an animation with ten words that we believed described ourselves. As opposed to using the frame animation in photoshop, we now use the video timeline. This uses keyframes to animate whatever you are animating; you can transform it, move it, and alter its opacity. Primarily I just changed the position of the words as they translated into the frame. The fact that you had to deal with the words one by one in a long and meticulous way was the most challenging aspect. I basically just had to have a lot of patience and pay attention to detail.

Bouncing Ball

Our initial animation project was to create a simple ball that bounced up and down. This was to introduce us to two main principles of animation: squash and stretch and ease in/out. We created the animation by creating a background layer, a layer of the ground, adding gradients with the gradient tool, then making an isolated layer for every frame of the animation. We took it into the video timeline and turned all the layers into frames, making it a moving animation. This animation was slightly difficult as it was my first time creating an animation, but the biggest problem that translated into the final product was the problem that I didn't keep the volume constant as I transformed the ball, which in turn made it appear as though it were growing smaller when it goes down. Also, the squash at the bottom is slightly choppy, making it less smooth.

Bouncing Smiley Face Animation

The Project

This project was to create a simple arc animation. We had to create a great deal of layers, practicing ease in and ease out (Slowing up and slowing down), and squash and stretch; two very significant and elemental rules of animation. We also worked with changing the expression on the face. Lastly, we worked with the concept of arcs in animation, executing it by drawing a path for the curved arcs prior to placing the frames of the smiley. This project went fairly easily and simply, until I had to save it for web, which is how we convert it into a gif file compatible with the internet. The speed you see the animation going is quite slow compared to the actual speed it is intended to be, and the speed it was in photoshop. This lack in speed creates a sort of lagging, choppy animation effect, and I would like to know how to fix it.

Links on the basic principles:

A Tutorial on Squash and Stretch

A Tutorial on Ease in/Ease out

A Tutorial on Arcs