Movement Evaluation

For this Movement based project I was tasked with creating my own movement, alongside creating my own ideological movement I had to create a memorable tag that described my movement, an “ISM” that would be used as a label for the issue that my movement was representing. I would create awareness for my movement by creating a short animation within Adobe After Effects alongside using a combination of other Adobe programmes including; Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Premiere Pro to assist in the creation of my animation.

To begin this project i first spent a week doing both general research into animation as well as brainstorming what my movement would be about. This took slightly longer than I expected, eventually stretching into two weeks until i had decided what animation techniques I would use, I thought my research was very beneficial to me as I initially was going to create a stop motion animation due to the fact I am not familiar with animation software, however I am very experienced with working with Film and DSLR Cameras, as well as the software that goes with that particular equipment. However after some research I found kinetic typography to look very interesting so I decided to accept the challenge of learning new Adobe programs in an attempt to create this new animation technique effectively. After some more research into Kinetic typography itself I then moved onto experimenting within After Effects.

I found learning After Effects to be the most challenging part of this entire project, having minimal previous experience with this particular program before I was forced to start from the beginning. I dedicated roughly 1-2 weeks of this project to sketching out ideas within my sketchbook and generally learning the different tools and key-frames available for use within Adobe After Effects. Although my ideas for my animation would change frequently throughout this project i found it extremely useful to participate with some general After Effects experimentation, having both a workshop within class and practising for several hours to develop my skills further while away from University. Both of these were extremely effective in enhancing my skills, however I found that the workshops within class hours were very simple, whereas I was attempting to practice much more complex techniques while outside of class, this part of the creation process was frustrating due to me lacking the experience with Adobe After Effects to be able to clearly see where and how severe a problem was within my animation experimentation’s. This alongside the fact that I found Adobe After Effects seemed to crash often, forcing me to lose large chunks of work and in general, slowing the creation process significantly. However I did find that creating my own experimentation’s useful, if I were to create more I would like to experiment with animation animations rather than simply just text, as well as condensing the amount of text on the screen at one time down while still being able to get my message across.

Once I felt i was experienced enough within Adobe After Effects, I moved onto the planning for my final outcome. First creating a plan in the form of a rough storyboard, while the storyboard outcome itself was not useful due to the fact that i changed my ideas several times after creating the storyboard I found it useful in the sense that it allowed me to realise the errors in what i was planning to create, realising that I would need more imagery in order to make my animation interesting enough and being forced to alter my plans to an extent.

I created my final outcome over the course of a week, due to more time being needed to research as well as spending additional time creating a second set of experimentation’s and sketching illustrations within my sketchbook to be used within the final animation I found myself very short on time to create my final outcome. Because of this there are a few elements of my animation that I would like to improve, I feel if I were to redo this project or be given additional time I would firstly improve the overall colour schemes used, I feel that simple changed such as reducing the harshness of reds and some blacks used would make my animation much easier and more enjoyable to watch. This alongside simply spending slightly more time going through my animation and perfecting some of the transitions and animations that do not feel quite as clean as others I have created.

Overall I feel I have created an effective animation that persuades and informs others of my ideological movement, utilising a plethora of different animation techniques that use both typography and Illustration, I feel i have been adequate inspired by my research, keeping myself informed about whats out there in terms of animation and ensuring to analyse others works before creating my own, understanding how to make high quality animations as well as reflecting on the work I have created, spotting where I can improve for next time as well as seeing where my strongest points are within animation. I also feel I now have sufficient knowledge and experience within Adobe After Effects to move further into animation, perhaps looking at more complex techniques that would yield higher quality results or shorten the amount of time it takes to create the same animation. I enjoyed this project and would like to animate more in future projects.