The idea for my AR animation was I wanted to bring my book cover to life and this is why my animation idea is based on the cover.
My idea is that the image of my friend Alex on the cover will walk from left to right and then right to left and as he does this the letters of the book title will float away. After he gets to the middle of the page again he will stop and then the camera will pan over to the back cover of the book to show what he is looking at and the text on the back cover.
I learned pretty quickly how to make things move using the timeline and the position settings I just now needed to put in the time to get everything moving. The first issue I was faced with was I had exported the title letters individually on an a4 file and so that they would be in the right position on the page but when I tried to rotate them it was hard as the anchor point was so far away from the letter. I quickly feed this by cropping round the letter really closely and then animating them, and was really happy with how the letters turned, moved as it was random and smooth like I had visualised. The other part of the animation which I found really hard was making sure the movement on my friend Alex was natural. I had to spend time making sure the speed and the amount he moved was normal. I don’t think I got this perfect but I feel I’m as close as I could get.
After I was happy with the animation I then moved the animation into into premier to add the sound and make some of the pauses longer as this was something I couldn’t work out in premier pro. Adding the footsteps was tricky as just like the walking I had to make sure it seemed natural and in time with the animation. I also decided that the moment when the camera pans needed an up beat song to add bit of humour. I then went back to my research into music and I . thought the song Rio by Duran Duran was perfect and when I showed this to my peers they found it funny which I think is brilliant and is what I was aiming for.
Looking back and the proces of creating the animation I am really happy as I feel it went really smoothly and the main challenge was the time and work I had to put in. I think the animation also works as a great introduction to the book as they both reflect each other well. Some things that didn’t go as well as planned were some of the issues I had with pauses and sudden jumps but I think in the end of the day while I didn’t learn how to solve these problems in after effects I used my skills in other software like premier pro to rectify this. One thing that has surprised me is normally my ability with software lets me down but it think my research into the software has enabled me to effectively communicate ideas and execute my plan.
Ewan Turners Blog 