Task 1 is complete! I was overall happy with my work and proud of how I managed to develop my After Effects skills within the past 7 weeks. 

In terms of the project outcomes:

Technical Achievement: My project is set in three parts. The technical difficulty of the majority of my project is pretty simple. Key frames were something that took me a while to get used to but obviously makes up a majority of the movement within my animation. The final part of my project which features a moving 4 colour gradient was the most difficult part to create. I followed this YouTube tutorial to help me achieve the final product. It helped me learn how to use new effects which really enhance animations made in After Effects. 

Implementation of Motion Design Fundamentals: There was a lot to take into consideration in regards to the principles and fundamentals of motion design. In terms of my project, there were many functions of primary motion, but secondary motion didn’t play much of a role. This is something I’d like to work on for my next project. Whilst there was no music used, temporal motion was crucial to my design. In terms of Disney’s 12 Principles of Animation, I particularly used 5 and 9. 

Design/Aesthetic: The design and aesthetic of my project are a bit chaotic. My original inspirations in the ideating stage were kaleidoscopes, so that contributed to the bright colour use and range of scale and rotation that featured in my project. Key frames played a major role in the constantly changing colours, rotations, shapes, sizes and opacities of my project. 

Learning Opportunities 

I originally had an idea to include a moving marbled aspect to my project as I wanted the movement in my animation to be more fluid than the examples we’d been shown. I watched another YouTube tutorial on how to create this. I wasn’t happy with the final product so I decided not to include it in my project. This is something I definitely want to attempt again to learn the skill. 

Another issue of my project was that I created the middle part, which features the squiggly circles, first. I really wanted to incorporate it into my project so I worked backwards for it to fit amongst the other parts. This is something I struggled with and will definitely not be working like this for future projects.

Future

I’m excited to use the skills I’ve learnt in Task 1 for the next assignment, but also for my own projects. I enjoy making little montage videos of holidays etc. so I’m keen to enhance those with some new effects. I never could’ve imagined the background work that goes into the final product of animation so the process has been really fascinating and it’ll be cool to start from scratch again and come up with something new.