Animal Project Part III: Animation
Creating an After Effects animation of the Barton Springs Salamander
For March 30, 2021
I started out the whole animation process by cracking into some After Effects tutorials on LinkedIn, since I am, on the whole, completely unfamiliar with this software and have used it for nothing before. I have a base level of knowledge with keyframes and basic principles of keyframe animation, but I’m still at a fundamental loss as to how to link vector graphics to each other instead of having a bunch of unrelated moving parts, and I’m also not sure about how I’m going to do something wiggly like a salamander in cut paper animation style. Anyway, I at least sort of know how it works now.
We did storyboarding for today. I wanted to do something with multiple perspectives involved, especially because I want to establish how small the salamander is, so I went for a three-shot approach — showing someone jumping off the pool diving board and into the water (with the skyline in the background to hint at why it’s endangered, but also to establish that they only occur in this one pool), then a cut of the salamander up close, then a shot of it darting away in the pool.
I thumbnailed the storyboard first, then used a prisma and a copic to make a version that would be more intelligible to myself and intelligible at all to other people. I haven’t done a whole lot of storyboarding, but I tried to focus on the definitive moments of each scene to draw out.
For April 1, 2021
Crit was useful! Dani said she liked the multi-shot approach, especially showing above and below the water, since it helps place the viewer in the environment. She also liked the indirect representation of scale by “zooming into” the plants, to show how small the salamander is without having to directly compare it to a person.
As for improvements, she suggested I hone in on a clear behavior I want the salamander to be doing, like hunting for food or swimming away from prey, rather than just lurking around. She also warned me to make sure that the establishing shot is short, so it doesn’t cut into the salamander being the main focus, which is something I want to make sure to keep in mind.
We did learn during class that we can have up to seven colors in any one shot, but that we’re not limited to seven for the whole thing, which is exciting. It gives me the opportunity to try out a significantly different color palette for above and below the water.
For April 1, 2021
I wanted to make some changes to my storyboard to accommodate the new ideas and suggestions. To add a bit more specific of a behavior, I decided to add in a school of fish. When the swimmer jumps in, the fish will move, and in the close-up of the salamander in the weeds, a fish will swim by that the salamander will hide from before darting away. The fish in the pool are one of the salamander’s main predators.
I didn’t have much time over the last few days, so all I got done was finishing up some tutorials and creating a new storyboard to serve as a guide for me as I’m generating assets on Illustrator. I do feel like I have enough information to actually get some of these things moving now, though — I think I can tie the salamander together with the parenting function, and use the puppet pin tool to get the underwater weeds to be wiggle.
For April 6, 2021
I got kind of depressed this weekend and had a lot of problems importing illustrator files into after effects, so despite the time I’ve spent on this, I don’t have much of a deliverable right now. I spent some time getting a salamander model made up; today in class Ana suggested that I find some tutorials on rigging to make it move around, so I think that’s what I’ll try next. I also fussed around with the puppet pin tool to make the seaweed wavy.
So, that’s about where we are so far. I think I want to update my salamander model to have the gills attached to the head, so I’ll have to duplicate it and add it to each head layer. In the meantime, though, I’m working on the backgrounds for some of my other shots.
For April 15, 2021
I’ve gotten a lot done from last time, and I have a complete video to show for it!
I started by making the intro scene. With many of the organic forms, as in the previous poster section of this project, I found it easier to draw the forms in photoshop, then image trace them in illustrator and clean them up, so I ended up creating all of the plant forms and backgrounds throughout the project on photoshop.
I picked most of the color scheme for the project in this first scene, pulling from my poster for the aboveground colors, but taking advantage of the fact that seven colors could be onscreen at a time to create a more varied underwater color scheme.
I mostly animated the scene itself with the puppet pin tool — I used it all throughout the composition quite a bit, actually, since it’s good for making the flowy, organic movements of the surface of the pool and underwater plants — and some simple motion animation to get the fish to move.
To create the panning, I figured out that I could create a “full” version of the scene showing everything above and below water, make it a precomp, then animate the motion of the precomp to move upwards as the scene went on.
I decided to not put in the swimmer like I’d originally storyboarded, since I felt like the scene worked just as well without it, and I didn’t want to make my life more complicated than it needed to be.
The middle scene took the most work; I had to redo both the salamander and the background. Ultimately, I animated the salamander separately, made it into a precomp, then animated the background and popped the salamander into it.
I also animated a fish to swim across the scene, which added significant complication — it was difficult to make it work with the limited colors. Once the salamander was involved, it took up three of my seven available colors, so with only four colors for the environment and the fish, I was having trouble creating depth. In the end, I worked it out to only use colors from the salamander and the environment to create the fish, which gave me one additional color to create depth behind the seaweed.
I made the salamander move using a combination of the puppet pin tool for the body gills to keep them flowy, anchor points and rotation animation for the legs, and hand-drawing frames for the rotation of the head, turning them on and off to make contiguous movement.
The final scene I animated much the same way, doing the background and the salamander separately, and using a combination of anchor points, the puppet tool, and hand-drawn frames to create the contiguous movement of the salamander.
Then, it was onto sound. Since most of my scene takes place underwater, I mainly focused on creating some ambient underwater noise that sloshed more loudly as the fish swam through or as the salamander swam away, as well as some ambient city noise to put in the first scene.
I made the sounds easily enough; I filled up my sink and sloshed my hand around for the water sound, and just recorded outside my apartment for the city noises. I also created another couple of water tracks — one splashing noise for entering the water, and one where I sloshed only where I wanted there to be a lot of noise to correspond with motion on screen, like the fish passing through.
However, the water noises were far too clear and high-pitched, and I ultimately ended up installing and playing around with Audition, which is an adobe sound editing app I didn’t know about until today. It worked like a charm in lowering the pitch and muffling the water sound, though, so with the sound edited, I popped it into my final composition.
And, here she is!!!
On the whole, I’m quite proud of it! It took a lot of work, and I’ve never used after effects before, so I’m impressed how far I’ve come. That being said, I’ve learned adobe software in a variety of timeframes before, and this tight timeframe was by far the least efficient in terms of hours spent to content learned. If anything, I have a better sense of the appropriate timeframe I need to learn software, so I suppose that’s a useful skill as a student.
However, I do now have a basic understanding of the interface. I think it’ll help me learn other time-based adobe software too, now that I have a bit more experience and frame of reference. I’ve always wanted to get into animation and time-based media, so it was nice to have a reason to learn some software.
I also really enjoyed doing something that was so heavily based in storytelling, which is something that I’m discovering is of great interest to me in design. Doing storytelling through animation both brought up and reinforced some of the aspects of visual storytelling I’m already familiar with, like appropriate framing, timing, and choice of what to include, and also some aspects that I’m quite new to, such as having to create all of the intermediary motion and work with time as a concrete constraint rather than something that you can stretch and compress with visual tricks.
There are some things I think I would change now that I have a better understanding of the interface; some stuff with timing, refining motion to feel more organic, and the like. As long as we’re dreaming here, it would have been nice, too, had the frame rate been a bit higher — some of the motion I created, for example the wiggling of the salamander or the swimming motion of the fish, got lost once they were in motion in an 8 fps animation. Another one color would have also been nice for the fish scene, so it wouldn’t have had to be the same color as the salamander.
However, I’m on the whole very proud of it, and looking forward to doing more animation, perhaps, down the road.