Applied Discovery Channel 7) Animating

After having completed a lot of research and planning, in addition to making several components, I thought it was about time I started animating. This process took the longest because I was extremely picky about how I wanted things to move. 

I made a separate folder on my desktop entirely for the components that I needed for each composition. There would be three, since I have three settings to consider. Each of my components were '.png's' because I needed them to have a transparent background so that I could layer them on top of each other, just like in the Photoshop document.

Once I had every component layered the exact way they were in Photoshop, it was time for me to start animating.

I actually started with the last sequence of the ident that I had storyboarded because that seemed like the most complicated to me and I thought that if I could have achieved that one then I would be able to do the other two with ease (I was wrong). However this sequence was quite fun to put together.

I started off by moving every single layer ever so slightly. But this I mean I used to position setting to make it seem as though every layer was floating. In Photoshop I had used the drop shadow effect for most of the layers, however for that of the sun and the palm tree, I used the INNER shadow, because I thought it looked really quirky, as if the components were imprinted into the background, which I loved! I really wanted to achieve depth and a good aesthetic to each of my settings, especially after having worked so hard to get them right. 

After I had got my layers to 'float', it was time to make the animals move. I used both the rotate and position settings to make my dolphins move in and out of the water, as well as when they jump in the air. This was extremely hard for me to achieve because every time I rotated my component, the position would move half way across the screen! Therefore I had to change the position little by little to get it to match the rotation. I made several attempts at this because I really wanted the jumping in the air motion to look realistic. I also had trouble trying to get the second dolphin to hold in the air, but I fixed that issue quickly and was able to add the logo in just as effectively.