We were tasked to animate a self-portrait of sorts, an assembly of shapes that we thought represented ourselves best. I ended up choosing mainly circles and triangles for my character since I liked the energetic and friendly nature those shapes inherently had. It also fit my goal of making something fun and cute.
This was a good learning experience of After Effects as I got familiar with the speed and value graphs, and experimenting with functions I’ve never been exposed to before such as using null objects to change pivot points mid-animation or to simulate a 2D camera through parenting all objects to it.
However, I also ran into some obstacles and a problem I didn’t notice until peer and tutor review, being that I’ve been unnecessarily keying out my poses too much. I figured this was because I’m used to keying out poses in hand-drawn animation, which led me to naturally do the same for motion graphics. Despite this, I learned to let the computer do the calculations of arcs more and made the movement a bit more fluid before submission.
