TABLE OF CONTENTS
3. Reflection
TUTORIAL
Cinemagraph / Self-Titled - Self-titled is an exploration project for the students to express their own individuality and reflect their personality into digital art self-expression. The main idea is to build up self-confidence and discover their interest.
PRACTICAL
For the animation portion of this project, my plan was to have my poster 'loading', while all other components move around. However, the loading process had to restart before finishing, thus creating a constantly looping animation. The general timing I will apply for the whole animation is seconds 1-14 is for the loading sequence, while seconds 14-15 is for everything to revert to the start again.
To start the animation process, I first had to think of parts I want to animate and leave static. The parts that I want animated are the floating face, pillar shards, sun, fingers, and grid. Next, to make the process easier, I cleaned up the messy file I had by merging and renaming the main elements of my poster.
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| Fig 1.1 Layer Organization / Week 13 (22/12/24) |
I then started working on the floating elements in my poster – the head and the pillar shards. For this, I simply adjusted the starting and ending position and duplicated it multiple times. By making even more keyframe duplicates outside the timeline, I changed the starting and ending points so that the movements aren't uniform. I also applied an easy ease to each elements, and the same will be done for other elements in the animation.
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| Fig 1.2 Face & Shards Keyframes / Week 13 (22/12/24) |
For the sun and grid, I want them to glow and dim repeatedly. For this, I just need to increase and decrease the opacity and size at the same time so that it syncs. Because the sun already has a glow layer, I can immediately animate it. As for the grid, I have to duplicate it and apply a glow effect with the settings as seen in the figure below. Only the grid's opacity should be animated since the glow effect in After Effects already expands the layer.
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| Fig 1.3 Sun & Grid Keyframes / Week 13 (22/12/24) |
I wanted the fingers to open and close slowly – like trying to grab something. To make this happen, I used the puppet advanced pin tool, so I have control for the position, size, and rotation of my pins. First, I placed pins in the joints and fingertips to move them. Then, I placed supporting pins in the corners of the fingers so that finger would stay in place when I move other pins. The pinky and thumb only needs to be moved and rotated, to show a sideways motion. For the rest of the fingers, they have to be scaled on top of that to make it look like its moving towards the viewer – back-to-front motion.
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| Fig 1.4 Finger Keyframes / Week 13 (22/12/24) |
For the loading bar itself, it was very straightforward. I had to scale the bar horizontally and move the circle with the bar. I also changed the speed graph so that the movement isn't linear.
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| Fig 1.5 Loading Keyframes / Week 13 (22/12/24) |
To finish things off, I pre-composed everything except the loading text and bar. I zoomed in when its loading, and zoomed out when its restarting. I kept the loading text and bar out, so it looks like a separate overlay, something like how the background of a loading screen moves but the UI doesn't move along.
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| Fig 1.6 Zoom Keyframes / Week 13 (22/12/24) |
After reviewing the animation, I decided to tweak the timing because I felt like the part when the everything restarts was a bit too fast. So, I cut the clip in Premiere Pro and adjusted the speed so that the first half in up to 13 seconds and the second half is extended to 2 seconds. Finally, I used an instrumental clip from the しわあわせ MV and added in a riser sound effect to the part when the loading gets restarted.
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| Fig 1.7 Final Adjustments in Premiere Pro / Week 13 (22/12/24) |
Final Results
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| Fig 1.8 Final Self-Titled - GIF / Week 14 (29/12/24) |
REFLECTION
I think this project overall went really well. Although there are some parts I didn't get to do due to time constraints, the results was still good nonetheless. If I had more time, I definitely would try and make the Greek statue avatar instead and would've added in a glitch effect animation to further create a compelling world.