Quick Content Experiment (Extra work)
After the last After Effects lesson, I decided to do some more experimenting with creating quick animations from scratch and creating content for it. I've decided to do this because I tend to be someone that takes a while doing this, trying different colours, shapes and ideas and I’m aware that in industry we would be expected to be able to turn around content in a matter of days or even hours. Therefore I wanted practice in doing this under some pressure.
I set my self a task of creating a 30 second animation in 1 hour, this included finding an idea, creating artwork and animating appropriately, I was aware before starting that this animation would not be the best because it was my first attempt and also in the lesson we had 4 hours to do the same task on a statistic based fairytale project. However I knew the more experiments like this I did the better my animations would get in a small amount of time, preparing me for industry.
I didn't have a lot of time and the first thing that popped into my head as a theme was the seasons, I thought about having one scene and the weather change around it, I had a 2 minute search on the internet for inspiration and got to work, the first scene I did was autumn and I change the scenes and saved each time. I changed the colour of the hill, the sky and also the colours of trees and clouds adding objects as appropriate for example leaves for autumn and snowflakes for winter. Once I had creating one I it was easy to change things quickly, however this did take me 30 minutes of my time and at this early stage in experiments half and half on content and animation was appropriate. Below are my 4 seasons as stills.
I only had 30 minutes to animate and as a beginner on after effects I decided to keep the animations simple to keep to the time limit and finish the animation in time. I went through the seasons changing background and making hills pop up and down, parenting objects to each other so they move together, I made all the trees and bushes sway in the wind while the clouds moved slowly. I wanted to add some text, just simple annotations but I thought it would add something more to the animation.
Over all I am happy with the result as a first attempt at quick content animations but I really want to keep doing them so I can get better at creating more complex content and animating in better ways in the same time frame.
