Graphics pathway- week 4 After effects workshop

My last workshop was on After Effects and how to make simple animations using basic techniques. I have never used this application before as was the case with all of the other adobe programmes before I came to Ravensbourne. Despite getting lost a few times, the step by set instructions on how to do certain functions and produce different affects really helped my understanding. Also some steps were quite repetitive when doing each of the 4 animations so it made the use and functions of the tools easier to pick up. However I don't know how much of it I would remember if I was asked to do an animation on this programme again.

This was perhaps one of the more simpler animations we produced in the workshop however I still feel it uses the available tools very affectively. I enjoyed doing this one as we were left to play around with and experiment with getting the reflections of the balls to make it look like they were landing on water. It also opened my eyes to how a very simple effect can be used to create something that theoretically seems not so simple to produce.

This animation is one that seems like it would be very complicated to produce, however using the tools creatively and to our advantage we were shown that it is not as complicated as previously thought. This animation made it increasingly clearer on how to use keys frames, as by drawing an axis for the moon to go around the earth we were able to go along the timeline and set the positions that it would be at different moments among the time line. Therefore we were able to control the speed and route of the object which resulted in it smoothly orbiting the earth. The typography on this animation was actually not intentional. When I typed out my chosen text it was already set to this font and when I enlarged it I realised that the lettering had skyscrapers cut out of it and thought it complimented the word "earth" well giving the viewer a sense of what the 21st century has brought to the world.

For this animation we again utilised the key frames tool and line tool to create a path for our names to be written on the screen. As this was my first time using the pen tool I wasn't used to how it worked so got frustrated many times and accidentally wrote my name in many disjointed lines. However after figuring out that this was the reason why the animation wasn't running smoothly, I used some spare time at the end to correct the path to just one continuous line and I felt that the improved version bellow was much better.

This was perhaps the most complicated animation to do as we were working with video footage and had to get used to editing videos on After Effects instead of just using still images. After getting lost and asking for help a few to many times, I finally ended up with how the outcome should have looked. 

Overall I felt that the last animation we did was perhaps my least favourite to produce although I have to admit that visually it is very effective. I also thought that the "Earth" animation was my favourite as I like how the tools and effects that After Effects had to offer were utilised very well and creatively here.