In this lesson, we learned about speed and dimension in animation. Our first task was to make a circle move from left to right, in order to refresh the skills we learned from the previous week. Then, we applied something new to our animation using keyframe assistant. It was a subtle, smooth effect, that when applied, changed the speed of the beginning and end of the animation, for a more natural feel. It was called easy ease, easy ease in and easy ease-out, and the name says it all! The circle moved in a much more realistic way, speedy at the beginning, and slowing down towards the end. In order to see this change in speed, we drag selected the keyframes and clicked on graph editor, where a red curve clearly indicated the speed of the movement. I immediately understood that if I had done this before adding easy ease to the animation, the line would have been linear, to represent the constant speed of the shape.
We also touched upon 2D and 3D. Separating the dimensions of the shape into its x and y-axis made it even clearer to see the inner workings of the animation in the graph editor. I learned that the closer the red line is to the beginning of the animation, the quicker the speed of the object is, shown by the bezier curve. We also discussed how when working with 3D, a third dimension is opened up called z, or depth, which created that three-dimensional space.
To enhance the animated circle even further, we added an effect named motion blur, which as predicted, added a blur to the shape as it moved across the screen. In my opinion, this was extremely useful because as we are learning how to work with the programs, effects like these help with making animations look realistic and appealing which will certainly be needed for future projects. We also added something that is very commonly seen in the world of animation: overshooting. It seems to add a certain charisma to animations and makes them seem more alive when they go over and back to their final destination. This principle is also seen in other parts of animation as well, such as when a cartoon character is moving, animators will most likely exaggerate their movements, making them swivel forward and then back. This creates a curve, which I could clearly see in the graph editor. We used the yellow handles at the edges of the red line and created an arc that allowed to the circle to go a bit further forwards, before settling back into its final position. This, in combination with the easy ease effect, and motion blur, made the animation so much more dynamic and pleasing to the eye.
I repeated this process with another circle in a separate composition, in order to solidify my understanding of overshooting, which can be applied to another transformative feature – scale. The idea was to enlargen the circle so that it would overshoot and then decrease back to its final state. I was successful, so I played around with red curve, tampering with the speed and position in order to get more comfortable with this new perspective. Since everyone got the hang of it pretty quickly, we went on to talk about interpolation and roving across time. Interpolation, I learned, is what happens in between keyframes, and automatically, it is bezier – for example when making the object loop, there is a change of speed and it makes that bezier curve. If we wanted to change that and make the speed constant, we use the control vertex option of the pen tool and click on the links in the animation, where using the handles, we can modify the bezier or completely change it to a linear movement. This was, essentially, roving across time. The motion of making the speed consistent, so that the values are retained, but the position in time is adjusted. Roving makes the spaces between the links in the path of animation the same, which is what allows this. It was fascinating, being able to learn about the mechanics of speed in animation. The amount of control provided by the program is astoundingly detailed and creates the idea of limitless possibilities.
