For this lesson, our focus was on principle one and five of animation. We were given a squash rig, which is an asset that is already set up with no controllers and enables use so that we can create squash and stretch. It seemed very simple to me at first – look a the example of the square bouncing up and down, squashing and stretching, and recreate it. However, this proved to be far more difficult than I thought. I can work with the basics in After Effects fairly well now, so I succeeded in making the square bounce, and even squash and stretch. But it didn’t look like the animation. The squash and stretch were what gave it a life of its own, and made it more interesting to look at, as it moved, but with mine, the style was missing. The squash and stretch were off somehow, and I had no idea in what way to tamper with the speed or position so that it looked more lively. I really struggled with this, and I wondered repeatedly if the animation on screen was frame by frame, it looked incredibly well done! I found out something quite important, that even with the necessary tools, you may still end up with a result that is undesired. For example, I had used graph editor before, and I know the sheer basics, like how to move the bezier handles and make the animation speed up, but for something like this, even with the editor at my disposal, I couldn’t achieve the effect I wanted, and I knew there were some logistics to it that I had yet to learn.

 

 

 

 

We also attempted to do some overlap, which I call follow-through/run. It is when something is moving and any appendages or extra parts like clothes, ears, tails, etc. start and end last (at a different pace from the main body). Again, we did this on after effects and firstly, as a class, we all attempted to do a swing. Following Nicky’s instructions, I created a new solid layer and made a swing with the pen tool and two rectangles. With rotate, I made the swing move to and fro in a simple backward and forwards motion. Then, in effects and presets, I clicked on cc blend, and put that on the swing layer. I was a bit surprised to find that the swing had disappeared entirely and in order to remedy this, I had to move the circles on the side to the top and bottom of the swing. What this did was move the mask that I had placed over the layer, and made the shapes visible again. From there, I selected the layer and clicked ‘effects’ were, like opacity, position, and all of the other transform techniques, cc blend was waiting for me to experiment! I could bend the swing however I liked, and I used the stopwatch to time it to be in line with the rotation of the swing. This was when I realised that something didn’t look right. The bend of the swing didn’t look realistic – even though I had added rotation and cc bend, the way that the ropes holding the seat curved wasn’t realistic. I didn’t want to start from the beginning so I decided to try again with something else and see if my second attempt at overlap would show me my mistake, which it did.

 

 

 

For my second attempt, I decided on doing some moving blades of grass, or ribbons, if you like. As soon as I went through the steps, I realised that my mistake was not moving the anchor point when doing the swing. When I moved the anchor point of the rectangles in this animation, the rotation and overall movement were so much better, and I could apply cc blend to receive a much-improved result.

 

 

I felt that the blades were a bit too simple so I created a third animation to solidify my understanding and try something a bit more difficult. I created a swinging pendulum out of rectangles and a star. A pendulum is a weight suspended from a pivot, and I had to consider the physics – the amount of bend applied would communicate something about the mass of the star to the audience. I wanted to apply quite a bit of bend, so the star, in my case, isn’t all that heavy because there is less of a gravitational pull.