Motion Graphics
When I first started using After Effects, I found it quite limiting because I didn’t really understand the program. At first we experimented with creating a simple squash and stretch ball bouncing animation, learning the basics of the program such as key framing and “easy ease”.
When it came to my self portrait, I went through multiple renditions of what I wanted to do. The fact that you can’t draw on After Effects in the same way that you can with Photoshop, for example, really threw me off at first so I tried to stick to simple shapes shapes of fruit knocking into each other, this gave me a chance to experiment further with easing in and out. This first animation was really beneficial for me to play around with the mechanics of After Effects, but as a semi-abstract self portrait I didn’t really feel like an apple being knocked into a banana really represented me, or was a particularly appealing narrative or visual. Apples have always had a lot of symbolism in stories, art, and to an extent my life, but this didn’t felt too shallow so I moved on from it.
My second attempt was more abstract, playing around with rotations— I was inspired by the iconic DVD screen saver that never hits the corner, but the final outcome looked quite erratic. While I enjoyed the process of creating the animation and testing the parenting tool, it was ultimately heavily inspired by another students work thus a plagiarised animation could never truly be a reflection of myself as the brief asked for.
Finally, I chose to portray more human figure. Adhering with the limitations of the After Effects pen tool, I decided to create a more silhouetted figure inspired by physical paper cut outs. With this attempt, I hoped to bridge the gap between abstract and figurative. 5 seconds is a very short time to express a sort of feeling or create an atmosphere however I felt that with a few key visuals I could create the allusion of a story in 3 parts.
When I added a window frame around the silhouette, it gave me the emotions of secrecy & isolation but also of longing for what’s outside. I contemplated storyboarding the animation but ultimately decided I enjoyed playing around with After Effects and seeing where that would take me. One of the elements of my animation that really brought it together for me was an effect I found called “hand drawn animation” which would add a shake or jitter to the edges of the shapes I had created. Alongside the textures overlayed on them, I think this effect helped give some more life into the self portrait- especially the final static image of the person lounging on the sea. I really enjoy the look of animations that are drawn on paper thus this effect really called out to me.
Overall, I was happy with the final outcome of the motion graphics rotation, my animation achieved my goal of creating an atmosphere while also letting me experiment with After Effects. If I had longer to work on the animation, I would have added some more movement to the final image however at the moment I am quite happy with the simplicity of the animation as I believe it works well in the time frame of 5 seconds. Though, if I had longer than 5 seconds I think it would have been interesting to see what I could go into detail with or what parts of the animation I could expand with different shots or even different scenes.