Animation Bootcamp 2021
- School of Motion -
Summary:
Animation Bootcamp is a motion design course taught online through the School of Motion. It is a much more challenging course than the Kickstarter course that precedes it. I enjoyed the focus on principles of animation and the power of visual communication. This course, most of all, taught me the value motion design can add to a project, bolstering a design's ability to quickly and clearly communicate the client's message.
Course description:
Animation Bootcamp Create Beautiful Movement in After Effects Animation Bootcamp teaches you the art of beautiful movement.
In this course, you'll learn the principles behind great animation and how to apply them in After Effects. By the end of this course, you'll have multiple animated videos created with professional assets and guidance that can be added to your portfolio.
12-week session
Highlight:
Seeing firsthand how certain structures within the value graph editor result in expressive motion in the composition. Learning the importance of small changes to the amplitude or decay of a curve in the graph editor allowed me to more easily craft smart, smooth looking animations.
This exercise titled "brain hole" provided me a good chance to integrate different animation principals in a number of places. With many moving parts, this project made it easy to practice adding bounces with squash and stretch, wiggles with follow-through, lots of anticipation, and secondary action.
Pong Challenge was a learning experience using the puppet pins tool, bending the pong paddles repeatedly to produce anticipation before each hit.
The Nudl project was an exercise if overlapping motion. My favorite part of this exercise was the challenge for representing the physics of pool noodle material.
The Dog Fight exercise involved working with 3d objects. I enjoyed the chance to visually tell a story on this project. Contrasting the fluid arcs of the green plane with the rigid straight lines of the blue planes gives the green plane more character, making it feel like the "good guy" as it works to avoid the other planes.
This project was a great into to the Speed Graph editor, challenging me to use an unfamiliar tool.
