It feels good to be back! My break was pretty relaxing and I mainly focused on spending time with family so now I feel good to jump back into projects I wasn’t able to get to in time.

Pre-course LAITS Video

After finishing the course graphics for the 301 Astronomy class, a new project was given to me that is largely animation based. LAITS has a studio that allows professors to stream online classes and a special feature of it is that students can even attend the live studio to see the professor in person (kind of like a live audience). My assignment was to make a video that airs before the class to inform students on things to be weary of during a live class and general etiquette for the studio.

I first started with designing storyboards for an animatic.

Next, once I was given the rough audio, I was able to make an animatic.

Once the animatic was approved, I was able to move on to designing the assets. This assignment has given me a lot of creative freedom as I was allowed to design the infographics for the video myself. I’m getting pretty comfortable with Adobe Illustrator.

This process was definitely what took the longest as I wanted to ensure that the assets not only looked nice, but also that the Illustrator file was properly formatted to be imported into After Effects for animation.

I have all the assets finished and am currently working on the animation. I’m excited to see how it’ll turn out!

Animated intros and segments!

With the flyers for the astronomy class done, I can now get started on the requested animations for the class. This task seemed really daunting at first since I thought I would have to think of and animate at least 2 different after effects animation, but with the help from my supervisor, I was provided with a suggested After Effects template to use to help my workflow.

Here’s the template I used for the animated intro for the class.

I’m mainly glad that the template was easy to figure out and I was able to add in my own images and text. Plus I think it’s a really fitting style.

I already got the animated stingers done which was also just a template I could export from, so my main task was to make custom animated segments for the class that were specific to the class.

I found another template for this and paired it with some free-to-use stock footage. Here’s how it looks so far.

I’m having a lot of fun with these templates! They save me a lot of time and can easily be adjusted to fit the class.

More Astronomy Flyers!

This week has been a lot of fun as I’ve been given more advice on how to play around with flyer design and tips on how to make the flyers more visually coherent.

I was given a flyer template to take inspiration from and was also advised to find new images so that the images used for the course graphics and flyer didn’t become repetitive.

Here’s some of the new designs I made

It definitely shows a stark difference from my first designs. I’m personally a big fan of the last design and the designs with the cliff image.

Here’s the newest iteration we were able to make. With the help from my supervisor, we were able to combine favorable aspects of both our flyers to make something really visually appealing.

Making Flyers!

I started making flyers for the Introduction for Astronomy class! This is my first time doing a project that is so heavily design focused so it’s a bit daunting but I’m excited to tackle it.

Here were my first designs just off the bat.

They’re a solid first attempt but I have a lot to improve upon.

 

New Course Graphics

This week, I got a new assignment for making custom course graphics for the 301 Introduction to Astronomy class. Theres a lot of variety I was given with this regarding pictures and formatting so I got to make a lot of iterations.

Here are my banner iterations.

IPad and PPT layouts.

And I got to make designs for a digital wall monitor.

I’m still working on getting the graphics finalized but with the images I was given, I have a lot of creative freedom.

 

Final Animation Updates!

The walk cycle rig is complete! I may go over and make more edits to it as I learn more on after effects but as of now, I’m really happy with the result!

There was a lot of trial and error with this project as I had to figure out what methods were not only best for the animation, but also more efficient.

Rigging

First, I did the basic After Effects rigging of just parenting all the limbs together and using rotation to make the figure move.

Rig Test

While this workflow worked, there were efficiency problems regarding having to move the other limbs. My first problem was having to be more particular about leg placement as the foot kept passing through the ground. My second problem regarded having to animate all the limbs the same. It became a matter of me having to copy over values from every keyframe to make the walk cycle look clean. Overall, this workflow was fine, but became rather tedious.

Puppet Animation

I was recommended to look at this Linkedin Learning course specifically for After Effects animation.

Very helpful tutorials

There’s a tutorial that talks about using the puppet tool to just move limbs in place rather than having to place, limbs only using rotation. I was excited to use this method as it looked really easy, but it wasn’t a method that worked for my design unfortunately.

Puppet Animation Test

The movement looked unnatural and would bend at joints. The puppet tools seems more suited to rubber hose style characters so I’d have to go back and find a way to make my original workflow better

Easier Rigging

One thing my supervisor brought up that could help my animation significantly was to just animate one leg and arms at a time and just duplicate the animation, offset it, and place it behind the body to replicate multiple limbs. This seemed a lot simpler. While there was a bit of a workaround to figure out offset the limbs to match up the animation, it turned out to be the most effective and still obtained a good quality in the animation

Final Animation

I had a lot of fun with this project and learning about different After Effects methods I can use in the future!