Morning Class – Alec
This week, the class was split between Alec and Sorcha. In the morning I had Alec and was tasked with completing 6 different tasks to do with blocking out and animation and fixing common issues with the graph editor. The first task was to make a ball move from one side to the other making it ease in and out. I added three key frames at the start to make the ball slowly start to move, I then added three key frames at the end to make the ball slow as it stopped.
The next task was it make a spline pass of the ball animation in task one to make it smoother and exaggerate the ease in and out. I changes the tangents in the graph editor to create an ‘S’ shape, this made the ball start slowly then pick up pace and then slow to a halt. I also make the tangents tilt slightly above the start position so the ball has a little motion instead of just stopping.
The third task was similar to the first as I had to use the graph editor to adjust the tangent handles to change the was the ball eases in and out. I fixed the broken tangents in the graph editor and adjusted them to make the motion smoother.
The next task used the Jack rig, I had to animate the head looking from left to right using an arc to make it look natural. I also turned the body slightly to follow the head movement.
In this task I had to add in-betweens to the arm swing to make it move smoothly. It originally moved in a diagonal from the first key frame to the second key frame the animation look jittery. I added some in-betweens to the arm to make it follow an arc.
The last task was to add anticipation and follow through to a hand that was falling. I started by adding in-betweens to the movement as it moved diagonally as it fell. I also make the hand fall at a slightly different time than the arm to make the motion look more natural.
Afternoon Class – Sorcha
In the afternoon we were tasked with making kinetic typography and watching a video about rigging using different plug-ins. Sorcha explained how to make the words move onto the screen and add the blur after the text. I started by adding the individual letters of the word pride. I then added key frames on the position option to make them move onto the screen. I then grouped the letters and duplicated them to add the different colours to the blur trail. To add colour, I added a fill effect and chose my colour, I chose magenta for this layer, next I added the effect echo make the blur trail. After playing with the settings to get the effect I wanted I did the same to the other colour layer, this layer I decided to use blue. I used similar settings to the first echo layer but delayed it so the colours would blend.