Eleven weeks ago I started my first ever School of Motion course and today I’m proud to say that I’ve completed all course work and materials, including the final assignment. There is still another week of extended critique left, but instead of revisiting old assignments, I’m planning to take all of the feedback I’ve received over the past two and a half months, and work it into my future projects.
Week 8, the final week of course material, was all about taking the lessons learned and actually breaking some of the rules! Additionally, it was also about bringing everything together in a minute-long animation. When it came time to make things perfectly imperfect in our penultimate Side Burns Elvis assignment, I was surprised to learn that breaking some animation rules actually meant making sure that the principles still held up. What do I mean by that? By using elements like hold keyframes to resemble a stop-motion feel, we were advised to remember the principles of timing, spacing, follow through and overlap, so that even though the motion felt a little jerky, the animation itself still felt like it made sense. As Joey put it, “the goal [was] to make [the animation] feel off, but not too far off so that it feels crappy.”
Bringing everything together in the Ice Sculptor assignment for Weeks 9-12 was the apex of the course. Here we were instructed to take everything we learned and pour it into a minute long video. One thing that I’d like to practice post-Bootcamp is to focus on intentional animation. Discussions with my TA, Algernon Quashie, revealed that one way to do this is through storyboarding, so before I opened up After Effects for the Ice Sculptor assignment, it was quite literally back to the drawing board for me. While watching what Joey had blocked out for all of the students, I did my best to storyboard my entire animation, asking myself what would be the prominent elements in each scene, how to construct interesting movements among those elements and how to transition from scene to scene. I was laying down some basic art direction and it felt really good to know where my animation was going from start to finish before ever creating any keyframes. Below is an example of one of my storyboard pages built from a free template courtesy of Boords.com.
Once everything was boarded out it was time to jump into After Effects. I started manipulating various design elements and played around with timing and spacing to get the desired feeling in my movements. I found myself focusing on weight a lot, and how to give every element a sense of it. Some areas of my animation still feel a little stiff to me, but I’m always reminding myself how important it is to incorporate follow through. I’ll admit, I did find myself going back to old habits at times while working through this animation (i.e., not animating every single element in a scene), but going forward I hope to strike a good balance between those old habits and new ones, like knowing when it’s appropriate to animate every element on screen versus when to animate just a few as an example.
As Joey mentioned endlessly throughout the course, an animation doesn’t have to be complex to feel interesting. Sure there were lots of design elements to play with while working on the Ice Sculptor assignment, but the real problem to solve was how to effectively use (or not use) them to tell the deeper story of the ice sculptor. One of the first questions I asked myself when I opened up the After Effects file was, “what is the most important part of this story?” Was it the different characters—the lumberjack and the ice sculptor? Was it the chainsaw? Or was it something more abstract like the craft? Whatever it was going to be, I wanted to know how was I going to effectively highlight it so that I made an emotional connection with whomever watched the animation. Yes, the purpose of the assignment was to bring together everything that we technically learned over the past eleven weeks, but effectively communicating is equally, if not more, important. I’m not entirely sure I achieved this result with my piece, but it’s something I plan to dive even deeper into on future projects. I can confidently say though that I came out of Animation Bootcamp with a wealth of technical knowledge and then some. I had the opportunity to revisit animation principles that got lost in my work over the years and build on my storytelling skills with intentional animation, and that, I believe, is a success worth celebrating.
To say I would recommend this course to anyone interested in animation is an understatement. Please, if you are interested in either learning animation from scratch or looking to enhance your keyframes, Animation Bootcamp by School of Motion is a no brainer. Thank you to the entire School of Motion staff for your support and expertise over these past eleven weeks, and for all that you do to serve the greater animation and motion graphics communities.
A special thank you must go out to Joey Korenman for being the best animation teacher in the biz. It was so much fun learning from you and you have no idea how much I enjoyed your puns. Shoutout to my fellow classmates as well! It’s been a pleasure learning alongside you all. I hope our paths cross again in the future :)
Keep it easy-ease!
