Create an animated short film.
The 2018 Academy Awards Animation Shortlist
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – the folks behind the Oscars – have just released their shortlist picks for 2018’s best animated short film. There are ten films, from which five will be nominated for the award. The films explore a variety of styles and themes and include Fox And The Whale, which we discussed earlier in the semester.
Semester Highlights
Thank you all for your hard work and creativity throughout the semester! I hope you’ve found the class to be enjoyable and informative – I know that it has been for me. Here’s a highlight reel that I cut together of work done throughout the semester. It will screen during the student work showcase at the Campus Theatre on Tuesday, December 5 at 7pm. I hope to see you all there!
Week 14: Virtual Lights and Digital Shadows
As we previously discussed, adding a virtual camera to a 3D scene in After Effects can give an entirely new dynamic quality to your compositions. Virtual lights can have a similar effect.
Project 12: Dinosaurs in 3D
Animate a 3D scene using a virtual camera.
Animation Essays by kaptainkristian
Video essayist kaptainkristian dives into the finer points of all kinds of media (music, comics, children’s books, movies, and more), but I find his pieces on cartoons particularly insightful. Check out his analyses of four very different animated series – Futurama, South Park, Batman: The Animated Series, and FLCL – and be sure to explore the other videos on his YouTube page if you like them.
Week 13: The Third Dimension
So far, we’ve used After Effects for 2D motion graphics and animation work. After Effects can also be used for 3D work – although there are some caveats. After Effects is not designed to do 3D graphics work in the same way that programs like Maya, Cinema4D, and Blender are. You can’t create detailed 3D models or complex environments in After Effects. However, you can move 2D assets into the third dimension – and create some unique and dynamic results.
Heroes, Anti-Heroes, and World-Building
Courtesy of TED-Ed, here are a few animated videos that examine world building and the heroes – or anti-heroes – that inhabit those worlds.
Project 11: Walk This Way
Animate a walk cycle and loop it using an expression.
Week 12: Page to Screen
For the last several weeks, we’ve focused on the technical abilities of After Effects as an animation platform. Now, let’s take a step back and look at the animation process in general. Live-action films have a fairly straightforward workflow: a project is scripted and planned, then filmed, then edited. The editor has a large role in shaping the tone, pacing, and narrative qualities of a film – they choose the best takes and camera angles, define the length of shots, experiment with overall structure, and much more. However, animators don’t generally produce much, if any “extra” footage – there aren’t multiple takes or camera angles to choose from. So what is the role of an editor in animation?
Voltige
Here’s a very short, but very effective, animated film by Léo Brunel. The excellent character animation and physical comedy are highlighted by the minimalist setting and lack of music and dialogue.
Analogue Loaders
Still Loading… High tech meets low tech in this stop-motion short film from Raphael Vangelis. Vangelis combined computer modeling, 3D printing, and hand-crafted creations to show these omnipresent markers of frustration in a fun new way.
Week 11: Walk Cycles
Now it’s time to tackle one of the most challenging things in character animation – walking. Walking is one of those actions that’s both ubiquitous and surprisingly complicated. When a walk looks wrong, it sticks out noticeably – good walk cycles appear effortless. The way a character walks also tells the audience a lot about their personality, mood, age, and more. It’s an important skill for any character animator to work on. Mastering it takes a lot of practice.
Project 10: Expressions of Terror
Use expressions to make a spooky scene!
Project 9: Make A Friend
Design and create an animated character.
Kill the Lights
Here’s one last Halloween treat – an animated short by Darren Pearson, created using long-exposure light painting. Pearson “drew” thousands of individual frames in the air using small flashlights to create this fun, energetic night out for a skateboarding skeleton.
Ralph Bakshi’s Gritty Animation
One of the most distinct voices in animation during the 1970s and 1980s was Ralph Bakshi. Bakshi’s subjects ranged from petty gangsters and street life to wizards locked in mystical combat. He brought a unique – and decidedly adult – perspective to animation and his unconventional style (along with his frequent use of rotoscoping) makes his work immediately recognizable.
Quick Review: Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts can be the difference between muddling through a program and mastering it. Courtesy of No Film School and School of Motion, here are some extremely useful shortcuts to help you work faster in After Effects.
Andy Serkis on Motion Capture
Motion capture technology has been around for a while, but it was Andy Serkis’s performance as Gollum in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films that really cemented its place as a viable cinematic tool. In the following video, Serkis discusses the history of the technique – and just how far it has evolved in the last several years.
Week 10: Expressions
Adding keyframes is one way of animating properties in After Effects, but there is another method as well – using expressions. An expression is essentially a line of simple code that is applied to an animatable property. It’s not the same as writing computer code – you don’t need to know any specific programming language, or anything like that – but the idea is similar. To add an expression to a property, alt-click on the stopwatch icon that you usually use to turn keyframes on and off. The value associated with that property will turn red and a box of text will open in the timeline window. That window is where you add the expression.