Animation with After Effects
Making some cool gifs for my portfolio
When I found out we were going to get a crash course in Adobe After Effects, I couldn’t help but freak out a little. I’d only used it once before, and basically felt like I was swinging a bat with a blindfold on. I had no idea what I was looking at, what buttons to press, how anything worked… it was really discouraging. I was positive I’d be the slowest one in the group, and that everyone would have to wait for me to figure out how to get basic things done.
First of all, Emily is a really great teacher. Even though we only had 3 weeks to learn about animation, I feel like I gained more than just basic skills. By learning the basics, I actually gained a desire to dive deeper into the program. Learning new programs is tough, and when I open one for the first time with no clue where to begin, it psychs me out big time. I’ve always considered myself really resourceful when it comes to learning on my own, but it’s really beneficial to have someone like Emily lead the way and show us her ideal workflow and some best practices. After learning a little about creating gifs in Photoshop with the timeline tool, I was really excited to dive into After Effects and see what I could make.
I decided to do some more work with After Effects this weekend and explore how animations would look in an alarm clock app I designed. My first attempt was to show how to edit an existing alarm. When you tap the alarm, a modal pops up showing what is editable. This gif turned out pretty well.
Next, I tried to make a larger and longer gif… and ran into problems. It took an hour to make this gif work how I imagined it. But when I brought it into Photoshop to export it as a gif in the iPhone frame, I kept receiving an error message. Turns out the gif was way too large to export. To get it to export successfully, I had to downgrade it to 25% of its size. And, well…
Not quite the same quality as the other one. It’s alright though… I’m still learning! I know now not to make them that large and extensive, and that gifs are best used for showing a quick animation of one feature.
Emily asked us at the end of class what we learned in the past 3 weeks that we thought we’d incorporate into future assignments. I rarely feel this way, but everything she taught us was invaluable moving forward with this program. Learning how to make basic animations in After Effects will take my portfolio to the next level, and I’m really excited to keep exploring it even further.
