I had too much fun working with After Effects! I like the understanding little by little of using this or other softwares for using visuals. Even if I know a little bit about the topic, it still motivates me to know more. I am happy with the little animation I did in the assignment, however, I would like to keep practicing and learning on how to get the level of detail for of a better animation! I know the level of detail we have to depict on sound, but I am still to discover the one on visuals!
I will describe my process in the following pictures, however, it is important to note that Ceren was close by, which was incredibly helpful because she knows her way around After Effects. I learnt so much from her the day we worked on our assignments.
So, I like space. One of my favorite movies in life is Interstellar by Christopher Nolan. But I am also an avid fan of Star Wars, Alien and space sci-fi. Getting immersed in the space ships functionality on speed and motor power is very exciting! Because of this, I tried to illustrate a spaceship jumping out of hyperspace with animation. To achieve this, there were various steps that I had to follow.
First, I wanted to draw the spaceship, but I wasn’t sure how to do it. Ceren pointed me towards the direction of picking a photo and draw it with the pen tool so later I could animate it. She showed me that the pen tool worked similar to Illustrator. I have used that drawing feature before on Illustrator so I thought that was a great idea! At first I started drawing with shapes but found it extremely hard. Specially because I felt I was not able to give the right angle and perspective to the drawing. I picked the following sketch.
This sketch was a little bit harder than the one I chose at first. I tackled the challenge of drawing this so it looks better in the final animation. At first, Ceren shoed me also to pre-composit to draw the outline with the pen tool, just lines for the general form of the ship and, eventually, some of the details in it. I tried to draw most of the details. After that, I pre-composited once more to change the color to something slightly different as well. I think it turned out pretty good for my first time drawing something as detailed as this one. I still would like to learn how to enhance the texture further in terms of lighting and material.
I needed a setting for the spaceship flying which would serve as the main scene background. So I painted a black space sky, a near star/hot planet and distant stars. In this scene the idea was that the spaceship appears out of nowhere, jumping out of the speed of sound and getting closer to the camera before disappearing to the left.
But before showing the final piece! I started working also in the animation expressions of some of the elements. First, I wanted the stars to be moving in some way to portray some life to them. I felt like rotating was very fitting to this task. I didn’t know how to make the adjustments in a simple way like trying to treat each start as an object from a star class, if that makes sense. The idea was to give some of the characteristics of a star and kind of copy and paste them to accelerate the process. Ceren showed me that I could pre composite a star, give the parameters and sort of accomodate them in another pre composite that mirrors the background, allowing me to just copy and paste them.
This same position for every star would be mirrored on the final background scene. And now, for the final animation. I used a couple of expressions. First, the rotation of the stars. Second, the loop of the scene and third the wiggle of the spaceship once it is returning to normal speed with the force from hyper speed.
Here, finally, the final animation.