Next year for e-Communication students get to choose two fields they would like to study in twice throughout the day either video, animation, or graphic design. So far i'm thinking of doing video as well as graphic design. I really enjoyed first quarter in the video rotation and have always enjoyed creating videos just for fun. I also really enjoyed creating graphics for a variety of projects. It allows me to use my creative thinking into new designs and ideas. Animation has also been really exciting, but its not something I see myself wanting to do in a few years.
For this project we created an animation in photoshop using the timeline. We started by adding text with ten words that best describe us. Next we placed a background image and I decided to use daisies since they are very happy and bright. I decided to use dark yellow text to match the center of the flowers and I placed a white stroke outside of them to make them show up better. Next, we started making the animation by setting a transformation in the video timeline. After I applied a transformation to each text, I saved it to web so that I could publish it. During this project I learned how to apply a stroke to text as well as how to make objects float into a scene. This project was different then than the last animation because we used the video timeline instead of the frame-by-frame animation. I liked using the video timeline better because it was a lot easier to position the words coming in and didn't take as long to set each individual frame which you would need to do in the frame-by-frame animation.
The second project we made in the animation rotation in e-9 was of a smiley face bouncing across my name. This project combined what we learned in the previous project with our own creative touch. When the ball hits my name, it changes to a new facial expression, a squashed face. Then once it bounces back up it changes to a smiley face once again.The last step was to add our own idea to how the ball would end up at the start again. I decided to make the smiley face get larger before it would spin back and disappear.
More on Animation Principles:
Squash and Stretch in Animations:
Arcs in Animation:
Digital Arts: 12 Rules of Animation
Ball Bounce Animation in Photoshop
In photoshop we learned how to create animations in photoshop using the timeline. We were also able to imply basic concepts of animations such as squash and stretch. The first thing we did in our project was to add gradients to both the ground, sky, and ball to make them look more 3d. Secondly, we copied and pasted the ball multiple times, each time stretching it a little bit more. Once the ball hit the ground it was at its most squashed phase and was very wide. We also made the ball slower at its highest point to show how an actual ball would bounce.