Motion Design Explorations

I started learning motion design to make more visually pleasing interactions for interfaces. Soon after learning the basics i soon realised that animating is something i really enjoy and so, I decided to take a deep dive into the world of animation and after effects.

This was my journey into motion design through 4 small projects, which helped me understand everything from the 12 principles of animation to more in depth knowledge about after effects. (this post is constantly being updated as i make new stuff and also add more to the process)

Project 1:

Shapes test

This project was to get me upto speed with after effects, i used to work on after effects a lot 2 years ago, but mostly for live action footages and for stuff like visual effects and rotoscoping etc so i knew my way around the app pretty well. The things i hadn't gotten used to was the graph editor, layer effects and other new stuff adobe added over the years. i used this project to fine tune my skills in the graph editor and then try using few of the animation principles i learned while animating, its still a little rough around the edges though.

This project took me approximately 3 weeks to complete — this includes the time to design, learn, practice and iterate over and over until the final output.

Project 2:

Man > Machine

The goal of this project was to familiarise my self with the plugins and shortcuts of after effects, by the time I started this project, I had a good grasp on the graph editor, the next step was to understand and learn all the inbuilt plugins that after effects had to offer. After effects plugins let me do a lot of repetitive tasks with great speed and also create complex sequences which would generally take a lot of time otherwise. This project also helped me understand how things like frame rates, aspect ratios and Motion blurs helped in dramatically changing the feel of an animated sequence.

This project took me approximately 2 weeks to complete

Project 3 :

Avicii Tribute

The goal of this project was to figure out how to make a short interesting sequence that syncs with the music i had limited time for this project so had to design simple representations of the music lyrics, which could be quickly animated. I also learned about paths and more layer modifiers in after effects for this project.

This project took me approximately 2 days to complete

Project 4:

Determination

This project has to be the best ones from the lot, this is the end result of months of practising. its the collective of all that i learned about the graph editor, plugins, layer effectors, syncing animations with music, designing frames etc

(it still need a bit more work, but its ok for now)

This project took me approximately 2 weeks to complete

This post will constantly be updated, cause i don’t plan to stop practising animation anytime soon. Ill document my new work and the things i learned from it, as i make them. So be sure to drop by sometime to take a look :)

if you reached this far, you should check out my other post on animation -

Intrigued Ep: 1. Studio Ghibli

Thanks for reading, and Goodbye