Animation!

So many gif possibilities …

This week we’ve touched on animation in both our UX design class and in Critical Making and it’s been so fun!

I had a tiny bit of experience with the Photoshop timeline from making architectural gifs during Design Discovery (below) but that was stringing together photos, not animation.

We began our Photoshop timeline lesson by creating a moving box.

We then progressed on to our own designs. I decided to make a dancing crab, in honor of my favorite gmail emoji that has since been retired. It looks simple, but it took quite a long time to get all the movements right. I found nailing the timing to be the hardest part..

Next we transitioned to working in After Effects in order to animate a previous project. I’m hoping to animate our entire New Mexico voting app project from last semester. Here it is so far! It’s been really good practice. Mapping out movements so painstakingly has led me to catch and correct inconsistencies in the sketch files. I’ve also had to create new assets to represent an action, such as the pressing of a button.

And finally, in Critical Making today (Immersive Media Design) we tried out animating 3D objects! I think I need to figure out how to export from Cinema 4D with a better crop..

I’m really enjoying the animation we’ve been practicing. It’s very satisfying to see your work literally come to life. It would be cool to try to animate a poem or short story or something, for practice!