Reflection - Interactive

For the past term with Steve we have been learning all about animation and how to use the program 'Adobe Animate'. Over these lessons I have learnt a lot about the program which I had little knowledge on before, and created many digital animations. We started by learning the basics of the program and understanding what it does for the first few lessons, then advanced onto learning it's specific tools and features. Since I started I feel like I have gained a lot of knowledge about digital animation and Adobe Animate. There's some things which I can still improve on like making longer animations or learning even more of the programs functions such as the bone tool, however I'm confident in making small animations using the variety of features I've already learnt.

One more thing which I learnt was how to incorporate my animations together into an interactive product using Adobe Muse, giving it the ability to become a functioning website or app. This is useful to know and produces a professional looking product.

This is the first animation I made in our interactive lessons
when messing around with the program. As you can see
I had some basic knowledge of the program prior to teaching.
It's fairly clunky and could be improved by adding more detail
or making the movements more realistic.

This is an animation I made in Animate to experiment with
motion tweens. Again it works but could have more detail.

This is an animation I made frame by frame to experiment with
the technique. It took a fairly long time to do however I was
pleased with the rough style result.

I made this animation experimenting with shape tweens, something
I had no idea how to use before these lessons. It was easy to do
and created a unique looking animation.

I created this scene using symbols to duplicate the penguins as
opposed to drawing them out repeatedly. This was a new skill
that I learnt.

This is a reference sheet I created for my character 'The Blob'. I learnt how to
do this in Steve's lessons and it turned out very helpful for when I came to
make animations for this character.

This is an animation I made of the Blob
eating for the final interactive product
I made. It's smooth and is a big
improvement from the first animation
I made. It could be improved however
by making it a little slower.

Sleeping Animation

Lastly for our character we had to animate it sleeping. I started off by using it's starting frame from the blank project and from there used frame by frame animation to make it's eyes close. Then I animated the blobs body with a motion tween to make it slowly get a little bigger then return to its original position. I then repeated the frame by frame animation of it's eyes and it was done. 

Making The Blob Eat

Carrying on our task of creating a character, I had to make mine eat in this lesson. As always, I started with the same position so that this action would loop seamlessly. I also drew a slice of pizza for my character to eat.

I started off by animating the arm frame by frame into a position where it could catch the food. Then I animated the pizza as an object to fall into the blobs hand. After I had animated these first two movements I accordingly animated the blobs face to look at the pizza as it falls, by animating the position of the eyes, nose and mouth. I then carried on animating. Again, using frame by frame animation I made the blobs hand reach up to its mouth (moving the pizza along with it) and it's mouth. Once the pizza reached the mouth, I made it decrease in size and fade out.

My timeline for this animation. As you can see I used keyframes to keep things
in the same place at times.

An example of me decreasing the blacks in
the pizzas cheese colour to mimic fading out.

Making the pizza fade out proved quite tricky in Animate, so in the end I decided to make the colours get progressively blacker to mimic fading out.
Once I got to this point I needed to make the Blob return to its starting position. I did this by copying and pasting the frames I had already created and reversing them.

This is the final product:

Making The Blob Play

For our next task, we had to make our character 'play'. This meant that it had to perform a short and quick action to represent it playing. I made mine smile and wave, then return to its original position so it looped seamlessly. This was fairly easy, as I separated my character into separate layers so that I could animate the parts I needed and leave the rest to stay put. I animated the arm frame by frame, and the face (excluding the nose which stayed put) frame by frame also. I used keyframes to make the other parts stay put. This is the end result:

Making the Blob Wait

After we'd drafted the character, we had to animate it... doing nothing. I made the stage the resolution of an iPhone 6 screen (1080 x 1920) then grabbed the sketch of my character front on from the model sheet and converted it into a symbol. Then I made it get slightly bigger and then return to its original state using motion tweens. This gave the illusion of it breathing. To improve, this animation, I'd like to make the character blink at random.

Character Draft

In lesson we had to create a character to later animate. I kept it fairly simple and made this blob. It changes colour when feeling different emotions (red=angry, green=envy, blue=sad etc.). I first drew him as a doodle (pictured below) when I got sidetracked from trying to draw a human.

I liked the look of it so developed it into a character, and drew it from many different angles on this model sheet, with some different expressions and the colours that go with them.

Shape Tweens

To create a shape tween I drew my initials with the brush tool, then went 10 frames ahead and drew my initials in a wavy style. Inbetween these two frames (frame 5) I clicked and selected 'Create Shape Tween'. This was the end result:

Motion Tweens

For this task we had to use motion tweens. I made an animation of 2 cars racing. Motion tweens are a simple way of animating an object which is fairly effortless compared to frame by frame animation. To do it, I drew a car and duplicated it to make a second in a different colour, then converted them both to symbols. Then, in the timeline I right-clicked the frame with the car on and chose "Create Motion Tween", then I moved the car to the finishing point. I did this for the other car and drew a background. Lastly, I double clicked on the motion tween in the timeline and added 'ease' so that the cars sped up smoothly.

Symbols & The Library - Penguins

In Interactive we had to learn about symbols and use them in our own Animate document to make an image of penguins. I drew a penguin with the brush and filled it in with the paint bucket, then used the selection tool to draw a box around the penguin to select it. Once selected, I right clicked the penguin and converted it into a symbol. Then, I was able to drag the penguin in from the library onto the stage, so I ended up with 4 penguins. Lastly I drew a background and resized the penguins to give the image perspective.

Frame by Frame Animation

This is a frame by frame animation I made using Adobe Animate.

It took about 30 minutes to make which was fairly tedious, however it was satisfying to see the frames all come together into a moving gif. To speed things up a bit, I animated half of the frames for the circle shape of the head, the copied and pasted them and reversed them in the timeline to make the animation loop. I also added colour to make the gif look more interesting.

To make the frame by frame animation easier I used the full stop and comma keys to go ahead/back frames easily, and converted all of the frames in the timeline to blank keyframes. I also turned on onion skin so I could see what was drawn in the previous frame and make sure everything was in place.

Adobe Animate - Timeline

The timeline in Adobe Animate is similar to any other timeline such as one in Premiere or After Effects, as it works in frames. However it can contain multiple layers of drawings and animations. This means that each layer can be dedicated to a different thing, such as one for a character, one for a background, one for an object and so on. Additionally, as well as working in frames it can contain tweens for things to move slowly without frame by frame animation. Similar to this, there are keyframes in each frame which represent what is going to happen in comparison to the previous frame. There are also different tools in the layer pane which can make a layer visible/invisible, show a layer as an outline, and lock/unlock layers. The timeline can contain drawings, symbols and audio.

Drawing Tools - Adobe Animate

In Steve's lesson this week, we learnt about a program called 'Adobe Animate' (previously Adobe Flash). He gave us a brief idea of how the program works. It has a timeline which is made up of frames which can be drawn on. I learnt that a lot of big companies start out in this program or programs similar to it, which helped me realise that it can be very complex, despite being easy to use for simple frame by frame animation. Programs such as 'The Amazing World of Gumball' are animated using Adobe Animate.

After we had learnt a little bit about the program, we were allowed to have a mess about on the program ourselves. I had used this program before to make a short animation for my entertainment, so I knew some things about it already. As we were short for time, I used motion tweens to make different background layers move to create perspective, instead of drawing them repeatedly for each frame. I also drew a character that looked uncannily like a dorito which I converted to a symbol so I could move it with a motion tween too. I animated it for 3 frames and looped it so that it gave the effect of him wobbling around. This is the .gif I made: