Animated A-Z: Quirky

No one likes to be ordinary… Quickly like my Q for Quirky!

Whilst this looks like a relatively simple animation, it actually had so many fiddly bits! The entire background is made up of just two repeated white triangles at different opacity, and there’s three different key frames for the masks controlling the bar coming in…

I’m really pleased with the outcome -it’s like a fun 80’s logo! It didn’t take too long, only about an hour and a half to fiddle with the background and masks. I’m pretty sure there would be a simpler way of doing second line that crosses the Q, but if there is, I couldn’t work it out!

As always, thanks for reading! I’m always eager to hear any feedback on my blog, some animating tips or just general chit chat, so Tweet me if you fancy on @stephhh.

Steph

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Animated A-Z: Position

Would you please just sit still!? My 16th animated letter, it’s P for Position.

I could not for the life of me think of something for the letter P. This is mostly something I wanted to experiment with, merged with the letter P. But as it turns out, it’s now one of my favourite animations I’ve done so far for this project.

It uses Trimed Paths for the ‘speed lines’ and a Repeater, so I only had to make edits to one line. The P layer itself has keyframes on it’s Scale, Position and the effect ‘Skew’ so it has a bit of drag as it jumps to the next point. The layer also has ‘Motion Blur’ enabled, which adds to the smoothess of the overall movement.

As always, thanks for reading! I’m always eager to hear any feedback on my blog, some animating tips or just general chit chat, so Tweet me if you fancy on @stephhh.

Steph

Animated A-Z: Opposite

Quite an outlandish one for this post! It’s O for Opposite.

I wanted to get my bouncing ‘realism’ cracked for this one, and I really think I have. I created just one ‘O’ bouncing and rolling away, then duplicated that over and over. Once I was happy with the colour changing platform and the ‘O’s, I duplicated it, flipped it, and added a colour invert effect to the right hand side.

I’m very happy with this one, as I feel it’s completely different from any of my other animations so far. I’m hoping I can continue to reach beyond my comfort zone and in the long term, grow it!

As always, thanks for reading! I’m always eager to hear any feedback on my blog, some animating tips or just general chit chat, so Tweet me if you fancy on @stephhh.

Steph

Animated A-Z: Night

The sun is setting and it’s nighttime for my 14th letter! It’s N for Night.

It’s a relatively simple one, but there were a few new techniques I picked up to crack this one. For the extended shadow I used a repeater on a duplicated N shape. It was about 120 repeats at 1px down from the one above, increasing to around 150 towards the end so the shadow continues to ‘grow’. I’m definitely going to use this again on future animations; it’s a lovely simple technique to just bring some excitement to a design. Both the shadow and the N have masks following the shape of the ‘mountain’, along with the tree shadows too, but this isn’t really too noticeable.

Something I did have trouble with was the quality. GIF’s only support up to 256 colours, and this animation uses a lot more than that! So when I came to export it, the whole thing looked pretty awful. I had to go back to my original After Effects file and cut down on the gradients I was originally using. But I’m a sucker for flat design, so it’s all cool!

As always, thanks for reading! I’m always eager to hear any feedback on my blog, some animating tips or just general chit chat, so Tweet me if you fancy on @stephhh.

Steph

Animated A-Z: Magnetize

Lots of M’s in this one! And it marks half way through my animated alphabet project. Here’s M for Magnetize!

With an M Magnate, M background and little metal M’s, this animation is quite M heavy! I wanted a go at some different illustrator, so had a go at 3d flat design (if that’s a thing, I definitely might have just made that up). I think it looks good though, and works quite well with gravity, shadows and all that fun stuff.

I think I need to step it up a gear and get a bit more advanced in my animations, flee my comfort zone! So I’m off to do more research and learn some new tricks of the trade. Fingers crossed, I might even learn some new illustration skills whilst I’m there.

As always, thanks for reading! I’m always eager to hear any feedback on my blog, some animating tips or just general chit chat, so Tweet me if you fancy on @stephhh.

Steph