Aim
Explore how to subvert the assumption on the tool that I was using
Rationale
The animation I made in After Effect looks much smoother than frame-by-frame and the motion of the character may not look really “robotic”.
Response
I did not do this weekly exercise in week8 because I couldn’t think of any assumptions or problems when I was in week 8 and thus I focused on my IOL project instead. I got some inspiration from the presentation in week13 that may be the following assumptions were applied when I made my animations.
Tools
After Effect & Adobe Animate
Assumptions
After Effect
Can only animate in a fluid way
Can only be used to animate in a non-line work style
Can only animate with images imported from AI
Can only animate the components with keyframes
Can only animate the components one-by-one
Adobe Animate
Can only be used to animate frame-by-frame
Can only animate in line-drawing style
I tried to subvert the assumption of “can only animate in a fluid way” by adding some more keyframes in between the original keyframes to make the motion of the character less smooth to see if it’ll look “more robotic”.
On the other hand, I looked into a tutorial of animating frame-by-frame in After Effects and attempted to animate in frame-by-frame manner in After Effects. This exercise subverted the assumptions of “Can only be used to animate in a non-line work style”, “Can only animate with images imported from AI” and “Can only animate the components with keyframes”. In the first one, I try to draw an outline of a cat. Yet, it did not look great and I went back to the tutorial and found that the new line and the old line should overlap with each other. Then, an idea of animating a water droplet dropping onto the water surface and thus causing dripple popped-up in my mind. This time, I drew a new line over the old line. Still, it did not look good. After that, I discovered this animating method is more suitable to animate a progressing line instead of an area. Therefore, I made the third response, which is a meteor falling from the sky and then dancing on the surface of water.
Reflection
After the presentation, Nick said that the motion of my character is not “robotic” enough that all the movements were too smooth unless I do it in frame by frame manner. It’ll look less smooth and may be more “robotic”. Regarding this, I tried the “add more keyframes” method. The resulting animation looked less smooth than before, but I’m not really sure if it looked more “robotic”. It’s still a good experiment to test on how to animate in a way with some “glitches”.
The animating frame-by-frame in AE exercise let me know more about different possibilities to animate with AE that I can actually animate in a frame by frame manner in AE. I can draw the lines/ objects in AE instead of importing the components from Adobe Illustrator. I can also animate in a line-work style with After Effects. I had a more thorough understanding of different functions of AE through this exercise.
References
After Effects Tutorial | QUICK TIP | Basic Frame By Frame Animation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMh0Zy7zJeE
Link:
Less smooth character saying “hi”
https://youtu.be/xPseHWDm1Xs
Less smooth character look sad
https://youtu.be/4fdL5XdTutE
