In the quest to always learn new things, one of the classes I’m taking at the local junior college is a motion graphics class. We’re learning how to use After Effects.
(I have to say, After Effects is awesome. I learned Flash a little while ago, and not having to deal with any programming is beautiful. I like keyframes and timelines. Simple stuff.)
One of our first projects was to take a previously existing bank ad our teacher had done and recreate it. We didn’t have to recreate it exactly, but it was 30 seconds and you had to animate things according to the voiceover. Here is the result:
(Excuse the resolution … I wanted to compress the hell out of it so I could get it onto the internets without waiting forever.)
Things I learned:
- You could easily spend three hours animating the first five seconds of your clip. (Our teacher warned us about this, and lo and behold, I got sucked in.)
- Storyboards help. A lot. Or at least writing down the key points of the script and noting what second the key points fall on.
- Animating to a voiceover is really, really, really, really, really hard.
- Uh, this is really a lot of fun.
I’ve gained a whole new respect for what the motion graphics folks do. It’s amazing. Our teacher also told us that we would never watch commercials the same way again after taking this class because we would learn to look at things in pieces. He’s right: I’m breaking down commercials in my head now. It’s insane. But it’s also cool to watch a commercial and have an inkling of how it was put together and how the animation works.
I don’t think I’d ever get into motion graphics full-time, but it is fun to dabble!
