Week 4 - 5: Motion Typography / Motion Graphics / Mid Term Film Festival

Project 4: Motion Typography/Motion Graphics
Create a motion graphics piece integrating typography.
Due Tuesday, October 25.

Week 5: Midterm Mayhem Student Film Fest!
Tuesday, October 25 is the Midterm Mayhem Student Film Fest! Be ready to show ALL of your work to date. Bonus: Cut it together to make a proper reel. October 25 is the hard deadline for all of your projects to date.

Background
Non-representational/abstract animation is central to motion graphics or motion design, which combines traditional elements of static, 2D design such as form, shape, color, photography, and typography with animation and film/video. When we animate a letter, such as, 'R' in a motion graphics piece, we are not trying to mimic the natural movement of 'R's as seen in their native habitat. We are making abstract choices of movement based on our own impulses, whims, and desires. This aligns motion graphics very tightly to music composition which is simply manipulating changes in sound waves over time. Contemporary examples of motion graphics are inescapable. Help! Animated logos, movie titles, phone and gadget interfaces. It's dystopian nightmare, I tell you, but think about how amazingly cool you can make someone's drab life for five seconds...  Here's a link to some contemporary examples of "kinetic typography"...

http://www.designyourway.net/blog/inspiration/some-of-the-best-kinetic-typography-examples/

Nice examples of motion typography and branding for the now crowd...


Technical

• All of your type will need to be converted into a graphic symbol.
• Once you've converted the type to a symbol you can leave it editable or you can break it apart. Once you do this, it is no longer editable. You can also break apart symbol instances. This un-links them from the master symbol. If you want to tween something that has been broken apart, make sure the broken pieces all reside in a master symbol container!
• You can include any other shapes/drawings you'd like in your motion graphics designs.
• Yes. Sound. Yes.

Week 3: Abstract Animation

Project 3: Abstract Animation

Create a 30 fps, 200 - 250 frame animation with a beginning, middle and end using color, type, shape, and SOUND. All due on Tuesday, October 18.

Background
Animation does not always have to involve characters or the illusion of observed life; we can simply create movement for movement's sake. Such an approach is a kinetic (moving) equivalent of abstract or non-representational art and design. The tension between conventions for representing three-dimensional reality such as perspective and chiaroscuro and purely abstract two-dimensional visual forms such as pattern and writing, is essential to art of the modernist period (roughly 1860's-1970's). For those of you fearing you have missed out on the dizzying elixir of the modernist era, rest easy; this tension 'twixt abstraction and representation is very much alive and well and still a crucial element in all of our our contemporary visual chicanery.

Check out an early example of abstract animation from animation pioneer, Oskar Fischinger, who created this film using... paper and string... egad!

Technical
1. Starting a file. Important! When starting a new Adboe Animate file, make sure you choose ActionScript 3.0.

2. Make sure you are working at 30 fps for this project. Select Modify > Document to change your frame rate. "Shooting on ones" will make smooth continuous movements like pans and slides much more palatable. Slower frame rates create a noticeable "strobe" effect. Ghastly!

3. Before you can tween, you must convert your drawing into a symbol. Make sure your symbol is of the "Graphic" file type, NOT Movie clip.

4. Learn all about making symbols in Miles' amazing video below:



5. Once you've gotten the hang of symbols, you're ready to do some tweens. Tween is short for in-between. Traditionally, in pose-to-pose animation, we would draw the main storytelling poses, or key frames, first. Once we had the timing of those keyframes down, we would go back and fill in the the rest of the frames inbetween the key frames. Nowadays, tweening refers to the process by which the computer interpolates (mathematically figures out) the frames between the keyframes.



And for that extra magic touch... nested and instanced tweens!
ooh:


And here is a quick gif of some nested tweens... er, uh, dank?

Sound
1. Use Adobe Audition to make your sound mix. Export as AIFF or mp3.
2. In Animate, import your audio file to the Library. File ... Import ... Import to Library
3. In the timeline, create a new layer, name it "audio".
4. From the Library, drag and drop your sound file onto the document stage (not the timeline).
5. You should now have a sound wave showing up starting with the frame 1 blank keyframe of your "audio" layer. Right click on the timeline and choose insert frame to extend the keyframe if you need to. To adjust the length of the clip, cmd-drag the end of the frame range.

               VERY IMPORTANT.    VERY IMPORTANT.    VERY IMPORTANT. 
6. When working with sound in Animate, make sure to set the sync property in the Properties inspector to STREAM - not event. Stream, yay. Event, boo. To do this. Select the blank keyframe on the "audio" layer, open the Properties tab, and set Sync: to Stream. An event sound will play regardless of the timeline. This is bad...very bad. If you export your video and there is no sound, it is probably because your sound instance is still set to Event... boo!!!

Change to stream. You won't regret it...

Additional pro audio tips (chortle)
1. Cut your sound DOWN to roughly the length of your animation BEFORE you bring it in to Flash. Do not import a 6 minute piece of music for a 12 second piece.

2. You can do some simple fade ups and downs in Animate to fine tune to your animation, but do as much as you can in Audition.

3. Don't be shocked if you need to go back to Audition to make changes to your sound file after you've brought it into Animate. Relax, it's all part of the fun.

Week 2: Bounce Cycles

1. Create a frame by frame bouncing ball cycle. Show your grasp of timing, spacing, pose to pose, and squash and stretch. Awesome. Yay.

2. Create a new animation in which you turn your bouncing ball animation into a GRAPHIC SYMBOL and place multiple instances of your symbol on the timeline.

3. Create a frame by frame animation of a character bouncing/jumping showing overlapping action and secondary motion. As always exaggerate to create an appealing show of it all.

Post all of this goodness to your blog. Due Tuesday, October 11.