Initially, I took inspiration from graphic designer Noma Bar and his animation work, especially work such as Be Future Positive and his medical series. To start I wanted to achieve this aesthetic throughout my project, however, I was struggling to combine shapes and develop such a smooth transition between scenes, the process as a whole was also quite time-consuming and had me questioning whether or not I would be able to achieve the number of clips I had initially wanted.
Therefore, I switched to a more simplistic style which also allowed me to expand my skills further, as the simpler illustrations required more animation techniques to appear more lifelike and three-dimensional, as compared to the more detailed illustrations.
The overall aesthetic of my illustrations changed drastically throughout the testing period of my project, going from a more realistic and detailed appearance to a simpler, almost iconography appearance. This was a purposeful design choice as I felt I had more freedom to animate simple shapes than I did have with the more detailed shapes.
Over the duration of this project, I developed several new skills, one major development was learning how to work inside the graph editor. As my illustrations were quite simple, they required a fair amount of movement and motion in order to build up their character. With this in mind, it become quite crucial to produce a smooth and realistic transition between keyframes, hence the development within the graph editor was such an influential development.
When beginning this project I became quite overwhelmed and confused by the sheer number of layers within each sequence, therefore learning to pre-compose layers was a game-changer in the development of each clip.
My initial focus area was ideated to be around primary motion for the most part, following Noma Bar’s style of animation, manipulating scale and perspective to grow and transition objects from one thing to another, however the end result of my project delved further into secondary motion than I had originally ideated. Each sequence consisted of a primary motion, followed by a secondary motion as a reaction to the subject’s entrance into the frame.
Disney’s 12 principles of animation was an extremely helpful resource for me personally, as it explored the importance of exaggeration and anticipation of an object rather than just the movement of the object itself. When looking at a two-dimensional object, it is quite hard to perceive it as something with life and character. Therefore by exploring some of these principles and adding secondary motion, following on from a primary motion, it becomes a lot easier to develop the perception of my 2D illustrations as 3-dimensional characters in a sense.
WHAT AM I DOING? 