Thursday 8th December: Vector Character animations.

Basic Character animation: Robot error. from Anna Loveland on Vimeo.

For this workshop we were asked to create a simple character made with vectors in illustrator. As it was my third workshop i kept the initial illustration quite simple so that i could then spend more time on adding more interesting transitions in After Effects, without the animation becoming too complicated.

I was trying to think of a character that i could possibly created a little story behind in the short ten seconds of the clip. I thought of the idea of creating a robot, i was unsure of a fun way to animate as = it would be quite boring if it just walked up and down and moved its limbs.

I came up with the idea that the could robot begin to break down and malfunction, meaning that i wanted the robots movements to be quite sharp and glitchy. To create this effect i separated the robot into as minimal parts as i could to be able to animate it.

Separated parts of my robot.

My next step was to create a background to go with the context of my story. I kept it quite simple with block colour as i wanted to add some glitch effects to the animation to give the effect that the robot was shutting down.

Initial composition.

Typography experimentations.

I added basic movement to my robot, but thought it was too simple. So i then found an appropriate font that would fit with my theme and created error messages. I liked the layout of this but it was still too simple with the glitch text just sliding on , so after the workshop i researched how get the text to type itself onto the screen, using a youtube tutorial. I was really pleased with the overall effect of such a simple and easy transition, it gave my work that finishing touch. In future projects i will definitely teach myself extra tutorials again, you never know what yu might be able to teach yourself to do to give your work that final touch.

              

This is the tutorial i used to create the typing effect for the typography.