Getting the hands dirty with Micro Interactions - A Madrasters Workshop
3 missed alarms. I realised I am gonna be late again. I rushed out of the bed. It was the day of the micro interaction workshop. I dropped in the Tidel bus stop through an Ola and entered the tainted gates of Tidel Park - Chennai’ s first Technology Park.
In contrary to my previous experiences with Tidel security, I was swiftly welcomed by two volunteers from Madrasters team. From security gate to the OrangeScape entrance, the swarm of volunteers helped us to navigate easily. Entry desks welcomed us with notebooks and pens. Since I reached 30 minutes earlier, I and bunch of people had to wait in the hall. I interacted with a few people from the previous meetups of Madrasters.
In the meantime, I could see the volunteers and Madrasters team working hard to arrange the workshop scenes. Since it was a parallel workshop where another workshop is on Tamil Calligraphy, few participants felt like attending both the workshops but couldn’t.
In few mins we entered the workshop area, where Mr. Vishnu Srini is waiting for us. Once all settled down, we unpack our arsenals and get ready for the war with After effects. Vishnu started off with the basics of animation and how easy it is to visualize simple and memorable interactions. Though my after effects gave a hard time loading up, it could easily catch up with Vishnu’s demo. Since I already have had my hands dirty with after effects before, I could help people around me to follow the steps. Occasionally I sought Vishnu’s expertise to understand better how to visualize what I have in mind. I successfully navigated to create the kickass twitter like animation(Its good upto my standards).
While others went for break to have snacks, I couldn’t stop getting my hands dirty with after effects. In the next session, we moved to much bigger interaction involving transitions between screens in an application. Though I could follow up with everything Vishnu says, I wasn’t able to bring up interactions as perfect as him. Need more practice I guess. As time went past 2pm, we needed to wrap up the session as soon as possible. I wish it could have been a little longer. I couldn’t stop working with after effects and get the nuances perfect. After the session bunch of us interacted with Vishnu about how to fine tune the micro interactions and how to deliver it to the developers to achieve the exact effect in the platforms of deployment.
It was my first workshop with Madrasters and I took home a lot of learnings from animation to AE Shortcuts. Thanks to Vishnu Srini and Madrasters to get us hooked to the Micro Interaction in the meetup and enabling us to take a deep dive in the workshop.
