Project Purpose/Objective
The main goal I had with this project was to animate in after effects for the first time. I had dabbled in animation in photoshop, but that is far from user friendly or simple. I was told that After Effects was incredibly forgiving with it’s program for newcomers. With that in mind, I set out to make a simple, 15-second animation of a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Challenges Faced
Throughout the project I faced a continual challenge. That being my Hubris. It was constantly making me overconfident in things that I had never done before and made me complacent with deadlines and progress. I found myself messing with layers in ways that I had never had to. Animations thrive on splitting up your assets into different parts. I had a really hard time adjusting and started my animation upwards of 20 times.
Project Process
My project started with an idea. And that was to recreate the iconic “tis but a scratch” scene from Monty Python. The idea came to me somewhat haphazardly. I was thinking through ideas for an animation and decided that a limb slicing would be fairly straightforward. I would have a simple red with white inside to show the flesh of the severed limb. And for the most part, that idea worked great! The tricky part was actually breaking down those parts into layers.
Experiences
After Effects and Illustrator work VERY well together (it’s almost like they were designed to). If you make changed to a layer in illustrator that was already imported, they will apply to the object in AE. HOWEVER. If you try to add a new layer, or change the bounding box of those layers, EVERYTHING BREAKS. It wasn’t until my 3-4th complete restart that I was taught that I could import individual layers without deleting everything I already had in AE. I had a mentor helping me throughout the project who was familiar with AE and she was a lifesaver, especially towards the end when I could not handle not being able to figure something out.
Key Takeaways
The big takeaways I had from this project were mostly about deadlines. I set many goalposts for myself to hit at certain times throughout, but I was always cutting it razor close. I still struggled with that to the very end, even typing this right on top of the deadline I set, but I still feel satisfied with my effort and more importantly, my animation.