DES 251 Digital Media Design III
DES 251 Digital Media Design III

Assignment 1: Print to Motion

Due: February 3 (beginning of class)

This first assignment is a simple intro to motion. You will animate an existing, static design from your Color Theory course (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde book cover). We'll follow the same creation process as we will for the second assignment (film title sequence). An idea/concept will lead to a storyboard which will be the basis for producing motion graphics in Adobe After Effects.

Before we can begin to animate we must first plan out the storyboard by visually explaining the idea and how typography and graphics develop/behave over time. Motion Design requires planning and a strong conceptual and compositional foundation from which to build.

Goals

After Effects Online Tutorial (Adobe)

Do these tutorials on your on time. It's important to get familiar with the AE basics before you start animating your composition. Together they're around 1 hour of video in total.

After Effects Workspace:


Essential tasks:

Storyboard

The storyboard should explain the animation over time, from start to finish. The goal is to create a number of sketches/frames. Each frame represents a moment in the animation. If we look at all those frames it should be clear what will happen in the final, animated piece. There are no clear rules in regards to how exactly such a storyboard should look like. Still frames alone may work sometimes, other times they may need additional information to help explain what happens (notes, directional arrows etc). Since we'll be dealing with a fixed aspect ratio of 16:9 it makes sense that the frames reflect this ratio (approximately, at least). The number of frames can vary as long as there are enough of them to explain the idea.

Please have a look at this article with storyboard examples for film titles.

You may use pencil and paper for storyboards or create more refined, digital versions in Illustrator.

Conceptual/visual realization will be favored over technical solutions. Simple animation can be successful when based on a strong composition.

Work on 2-3 different ideas or iterations of the same idea. Choose one and post it to our class website.

Due: The storyboards have to be posted on the class website by Tuesday, January 24 (beginning of class).

Preparation: Illustrator

Recreate the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde composition from your Color Theory course using these Illustrator templates. I created the templates so they already match the dimensions of the movie you'll create (1080 x 720px / "bookgrid-hd" or 1920 x 1280px / "bookgrid-full-hd"). If you have a newer computer you can work on the full hd version. The book cover grid needed to be modified to fit those new dimensions. So the first step for you is to re-do one of your designs inside this new Illustrator document using the given grid. It has the same amount of grid units but it's slightly larger. Since it's important that the composition is pixel exact, please re-do the design rather than just copy, paste and scaling it. If the "Snap-to-grid" option is active it should be easy to place things into the grid. You may need to change the size of the grid in your preferences. Position of the grid can be adjusted using the rulers in Illustrator.

Since you can import Illustrator layers into After Effects it's important that you structure your layers well in your Illustrator document. Ideally each element that you'll animate should be placed in it's own layer. It also helps if you merge separate grid units to "united" vector elements (Select elements and go to Window > Pathfinder > Shape Modes:Unite). Take a look at your story board and identify which elements need to be animated individually. Put those elements into separate layers. Finally name the layers so that you can easily identify their "role" later in After Effects (the layer names will be visible in AE).

Preparation: After Effects

1. Open After Effects, go to the top menu and select File > New > New Project.

2. Go to File > Import > File, browse to you Illustrator file, select it and "Open" it with the following settings: Import Kind: Composition, Footage Dimensions: Layer Size

3. Composition settings will match the size of the Illustrator document. You can check by selecting the (automatically created) composition from the project window and go to Composition > Composition Settings. Depending which Illustrator template you have chosen (HD "720" or full HD "1080") you have specific settings. Below an example for the HD "720" version. Here you can adjust the duration of the clip. Choose a black background.