In this past week, we have started working with Premiere. This marks the third motion-based program we have used, with the other two being After Effects and Animate. All three have different purposes, and therefore many differences.
After Effects is what it sounds like- a program mainly for adding effects after filming. We used it to create motion graphics. It is fairly similar to Premiere in layout. One example of a shared feature is the stopwatch they both have to control timing. After Effects also shares some features with Animate. Both use keyframes and easing. Premiere is a program made for editing- not necessarily effects. Therefore it does not have as many tools or effects as Animate and After Effects. In fact, it features the smallest toolbar of any program we’ve used this year. (At least as far as I can remember) I haven’t had much time to learn about it, but from what I have done I have found it to be, as I said before, reasonably similar to After Effects. Adobe Animate differed greatly from the two programs I have mentioned. While Adobe After Effects and Premiere looked similar, Animate looked very different. The layout was more reminiscent of Illustrator, which reflects one of the main differences between the programs. In Animate, you illustrate pretty much everything yourself. All you make has to be from scratch, which is not necessarily the case for After Effects or Premiere. There are hardly any things all three programs have in common. The only that comes to mind is the timeline. It’s interesting how much three motion-based programs all made by Adobe can differ.
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Though I’m a bit behind on my final project, we are supposed to have finished animation now. Animation has been a very interesting unit. At times it has been frustrating (see my previous post for more information on that) and tedious. Still, I have enjoyed it. I always liked the finished product, and I mostly felt like all the hard work was worth it.
The first animation we did was the ball animation. In it, a ball simply bounced on the ground. Still, it took forever, as we animated it traditionally. What I mean by that is every frame was done individually. This process was extremely tedious, and took a long time. Still, I was very happy with the end result. I didn’t mind that my attempt at squash and stretch ended up making a ball that looked like jelly. The hard work I put into it made the result much more enjoyable than it would have been if it was easy to make. The second animation we did was a motion graphic. I enjoyed learning how to make motion graphics, but didn’t really put as much effort into it. It took no time compared to the ball animation. When I finished it, I didn’t feel as satisfied. This wasn’t only because it didn’t look particularly good, but it was also because I hadn’t put the same amount of time and effort as I did for the ball animation. The third animation was the infamous monster animation. I already addressed my frustrations with this in my last post. The animation was made in Adobe Animate. As I said before, I found the program to be very frustrating. There were a lot of ways in which I could make mistakes. It took a long time to finish, but when I did, I was pretty satisfied with the result. Though I’m not sure if I will pursue animation much further than I already have, I have learned a lot from it. One of the most important things I’ve learned is patience. I think that, after animation, I will appreciate projects that take less time more. In the end, I’m happy we spent this time working with animation.
In these past weeks we have been working with Adobe Animate. In that time I created the monster gif you can see above from a tutorial. I do not consider Animate to be one of my favorite programs. I encountered many frustrating problems when using it. The first was my trouble in creating shapes. The monster we were making was not made up of any common shapes, which forced me to use the pen tool. I quickly found the pen tool in Animate operated differently from the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator. The pen tool in Animate had a tendency to to create more angular shapes. This did not compliment the organic look of the monster. The pen tool also had a tendency to count lines as separate even if they were connected. Still, the pen tool wasn’t responsible for the most time consuming problems. That honour goes to the way the program operated. When I say that I don’t mean the interface or how it was organized. I didn’t really have any trouble getting used to it or figuring out how it worked. The problems arose when I made mistakes. In other programs I have used, like Photoshop and Illustrator, mistakes can be easily remedied if they happen. I cannot say the same for illustrate. There were a lot of opportunities to mess up, and when I did, it would often be a while until I noticed it. Thus, I would usually be forced to go back several steps to fix it. Luckily, I never had to restart, but I did lose a large amount of time. Most of the time I could see what I had done, but other times it seemed like the program had a mind of its own. I remember one of the eyebrows began jittering about for seemingly no reason. This forced me to do the eyebrows all over again to fix it.
In the end, my first experience with Animate was rather frustrating. Still, I ended up with a good result, and I hope to get more familiar with this program.
Idle animations have always interested me. I remember an afternoon spent discussing with a friend what the idle animations of people we knew would be if they were characters in a video game. When thinking of idle animations in games I have played, only one game comes to mind. It was this game that sparked the discussion I mentioned at the beginning of this post—Lego Dimensions. Lego Dimensions was a game that brought together many different worlds, including Batman, Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice and the Lego Movie. All the characters had multiple different idle animations. They would also say different things depending on which characters were present. I loved these idle animations and sayings because most, if not all of them, were references to things in the movies or shows the characters were from. The Batman from the Lego Batman Movie would take out a guitar at times, as he played a guitar in the movie. Betelgeuse would spin his head around, which, unsurprisingly, he does in the movie. One of the more interesting characters for idle animations was the the Doctor from Doctor who. While there are currently 13 Doctors, at the time, there were only twelve. Therefore, within one character, there were twelve, and each had, not only their own way of standing, their own weapons, their own phrases, but their own idle animations. Unfortunately, I don’t remember all of them, but I do remember some. The Twelfth Doctor would occasionally take out a blackboard and write on it. The Tenth Doctor would, at times, put on 3-D glasses, or build some gadget. The idle animations were extremely important in lending a different personality to each Doctor, and beyond that, each character.
Couture, Joel. “What Makes a Great Idle Animation? Devs Share Their Favorites.” Gamasutra: The Art & Business of Making Games, UBM, 21 May 2018, gamasutra.com/view/news/318163/What_makes_a_great_idle_animation_Devs_share_their_favorites.php. |
AuthorI'm interested in film and animation. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools.
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