The main sections we covered in this session included animating an illustrator document of two cars crashing, using the particle system to create an effect where the cars collided, using the rotoscoping pen to isolate a photo of a wooden mannequin from the background, and using After Effects' version of the puppet tool to manipulate it.
Though it was a relatively simple animation, I initially had some difficulty with animating the cars to do what I wanted, especially during the part where they crashed. One particular problem was when I was trying to animate the cars bouncing off each other slightly upon impact, but for some reason, when the cars moved back, they were flipping around and overall being quite buggy.
Since I was having trouble fixing it, I asked the tutor for assistance, who was able to show me a way of fixing the problem. From there, I had a much easier time animating. One of the things he showed me was that I could directly edit the curves to fine tune the movements, which up until now I didn't realise you could do.
The two other things we added to the sequence were particles and a screen shake to the part where the cars collide. Although I was following the same steps as the tutor, his particle animation looked different for some reason. However, my result still looked good enough, so I didn't try too hard to make them match.
To make the screen shake, we used a type of expression called "wiggle". An initial problem we were having was that upon adding this expression the screen shake persisted throughout the whole video, even when we didn't want it to play. To fix this problem, instead of adding the shake expression within that sequence, we opened it in a new precomp, and diced it up into three different parts by holding the Control, Shift and D keys. We then added the shake expression to the particular section we wanted the screen to shake in, thus leaving out the parts we didn't want to shake untouched.
The rotoscoping brush and puppet tool weren't that difficult to understand, but when going through the process, I accidently missed the part where you had to "freeze frame", which got me very confused when the mask I had set for the mannequin kept changing every frame. At first I tried a couple different things such as unfreezing and refreezing the rotoscoping brush, but I after looking back through today's PowerPoint, I found what I had missed.
After finding where the option to freeze frame was, I found that it was greyed out, which I wasn't sure how to fix until I found out that the sequence had to be a precomp for the option to be available. Once I had done this, the last thing to do was to use the puppet tool to animate the figure moving. The movements I ended up giving my figure were pretty simple.
In the second half of the session, we looked for examples of motion graphics that could inspire our own creations. Out of the examples I looked at, these were the ones I found most interesting:
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