ANIMATION

PART ONE – Experiments In Animation

To get a basis of what to do in animation I initially created 2 animations to see how they would work and what techniques I’m instantly drawn too.

For my first animation I put a character and a background into photoshop and saved each invidual image as frames and then placed them into premiere pro to turn it into a video.

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PART TWO – Analyse One Form of Animation

Motion Graphics is basically animated graphic design. Its used to animate shapes or text usually in adverts to make them a lot more interesting to watch. This is because they are simple looking and easy to follow so they’re good at helping your brand get its point across.

Motion Graphics is used to make your audience engage easier with your brand by inspiring them, they can be used to quickly and effectively tell your story or explain your brand.

Motion Graphics is mostly made in After Effects as that’s where you can create motion design projects the easiest.

This is someones show real which shows a huge variety of different ways to use motion animation. Which this is similar to what I am currently doing as work for a YouTube channel, so focusing on this could help me expand my work and create a video with some more animated elements in it. This video highlights a lot of different ways you can use this form of animation to either animate text or logos which would be mainly used to make adverts have more depth and be more visually appealing.

Gusto.

https://www.gusto.film/animation/

Gusto. are a company that have an animation studio in which they’ll take commissions and use “3D logos, motion graphics and character-based” to make an advert for your brand. After looking at their work on their website I can see its very sharp and simplistic, they use solid colour cartoons with very minimal shading which I feel works very well as its not too much and the videos are very to the point.

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PART THREE – Develop Ideas

I am currently working for a YouTube channel that makes animated videos on After Effects. They’re comparison videos that cycle through columns and have various parts of the sequence animated in different ways. For my animation project I wanted to make a video for YouTube channel whilst expanding on what we already do.

I’m going to follow the brief to learn some new techniques to create a video with some more animation in it. I won’t be able to completely change the videos as they have to be very similar to stay consistent, but I will just expand on what we already do.

This is an example of what we do:

We already animate these videos a lot but I’m going to add to this as for the next video were going to be comparing how different things would look in real life compared to in the game of Minecraft so instead of a value being in the hexagons I’m going to have to animate the images to follow the motion of the hexagons. This will be done by animating the images to match the hexagons, the hexagons that are in the video were made and imported on another project file meaning that they are now just renders of the animation made before so I wont be able to just copy over the animation data to the images, I’ll just have to track them individually.

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PART FOUR – Making the Animation

Proposal

Form of Animation Chosen:
I have chosen to focus on Motion Graphics as that is what I am already doing for work and I want to see how we can improve videos in the future.

Expected Run Time of Animation:
The video will be 3 minutes.

Synopsis:
I am going to animate a video which compares a how Minecraft things would look in real life. This video is going to be an ongoing sequence of columns with both the in game images and the real life variant as well as captions and titles of each one.

Purpose of Animation:
The purpose of this animation is for entertainment, we run a YouTube channel that posts these videos 3 days a week and we look to gain views as well as making sure they retain watching the video to gain the most amount of money, this means we need to try to keep them as engaged as possible throughout.

Outline of Animation:
I’m going to animate the images at the bottom so they come in and aren’t just static so we can keep people as interested as possible as well as animate the images at the top so they match the hexagons.

Technical Considerations:
The video will be first made in After Effects and then once rendered it will be put into Premiere Pro to add the music, sound effects and end screen.

Step 1: Icons

The first step was to find all the images, one set of the in game icons and then another of what these images will look like in real life.

Step 2: Inputting The Images and Renders and data

At first the template looks like this and there’s a couple things to change, I have to add the Hexagon renders, change the hexagon colour to green to match the channel and add the images that go at the bottom.

The video will then look like this. The next part is adding the data (title, description, disclaimer, end text) usually the figures are the top would be included but for this video I’m going to make the hexagons blank.

I repeated this step for all 50 columns.

I then resized each image and added some motion to each one, an increase in size and then a wobble on each.

In a still image the images obviously look lopsided due to them having motion but after a couple seconds then stop and are in place for the rest of the time on screen.

Step 3: Adding the final Images and Animating Them

The first 4 columns needed an extra step to them as those hexagons come from the side and have a twist to them so obviously I needed to match those first.

Then from then on the images just came from bottom up and decreased in size as the video goes along so I matched this with the hexagons on each one.

Step 4: Finishing up

All that was left to do was render, move to premiere to add the music, the sound effects for the first 4 columns, and the end screen as well as an adjustment layer to brighten the video and then we needed to post it.

Final Product

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PART FIVE – Reflecting on Success

I feel like this style of video was very successful, it was our most well preforming video for the timeframe, and it quickly reached over a million views. This style with a lot more visuals and less data seemed to appeal to our audience more than other videos in the past. I also think the bright colours on the thumbnail played a part in this as well as the title being very clickable. I feel like at points the animation could have been a little smoother to match the motion of the hexagons but due to us running on a schedule I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked for fine tuning. Obviously the style is very basic as its just repetition however I feel like this extra step has added a lot more and I’m willing to try it again.

For this video due to me managing this channel and editing the videos I took a lead role, I had to review the research for any mistakes and approve the order and the content inside it, I then edited it and also worked along side the designer who made the thumbnail. Working along side this team on a day to day basis has helped me over time build up confidence in my decisions and has helped me learn a lot about the YouTube industry, I’ve now been working with different people on this YouTube channel for a year now and I feel like this has pushed me forward to become more motivated in the end.