Final Project Animation

As part of our final major projects, we were all given a brief to create a small animation on the theme of 'transformation'. We were given free reign to interpret transformation in whichever way we wanted in relation to our own projects, and the animation could be anything from a few seconds of an image changing from one thing to another, to a full blown animation that lasted a few minutes.

I think I probably aimed for somewhere in between the two parameters, as the main images I had at the beginning of the project were my astronaut and diver, so I thought they'd lend themselves to a change from one to the other as they were made with the same blueprint. But I also didn't just want to do a fade from one to the other, as I'd already done that with the 8x8 animation I did last year.

I talked with tutors about the possibility of making an interactive app for the ipad, but it became clear pretty quickly that doing that would take a lot of time and would be too complex for me to try and do for real. So instead we decided that it would be possible to make an animation in After Effects and play it through the ipad whilst filming someone faking the movements as if it were a real app. So the final piece is more of a proposal for a possible app that could be made with my work.


Below is the animation on its own, and then the final video showing it in use...

 

One of the things I probably should have thought about at the beginning of this was the fact that I don't actually own an ipad or iphone, so it made it a little bit more difficult to work out how it might work. So I did some research into the different interactive movements you can do on an ipad, and watched some tutorials, to try and get it to look somewhat genuine. I also wasn't able to make versions as I went along to try it out, so if I were to do this again in the future I think it would be best to borrow an ipad/iphone off someone to get it to look as real as possible.


Another problem was working out how I could fake the movements on the ipad, without actually touching the screen (as it would brings up menus etc.) and then having to memorise the actions, needless to say it was a longer process than I was anticipating!
These problems were solved by some high-tech gluing of card onto the finger tips, and a good few takes of the filming. 

Overall however I'm really pleased with the outcome and I think it was definitely worth giving it a go and seeing what happened. I'd definitely like to try and make a real app of some sort in the future as I think my work can be quite flat which probably lends itself to these sort of things quite well, and with the advent of digital magazines and ebooks (not to mention actual apps and touch screen games etc.), we'll probably be seeing a lot more of these type of things in the future.

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