Year2 Assignment1: Three Easy Pieces

The brief

In this assignment, you will be exploring the key principles of motion design, and you will produce three pieces of animation which illustrate or demonstrate a range of these animation principles.

You will design, storyboard and make 3 pieces of animation which use shapes rather than complex drawings or recognizable objects. Given that the graphic objects are relatively simple drawings, the choice of colour palette is an important design concern. These animations will be between 15 and 20 seconds in length each, and you will vary the number of elements you are animating from one to many across the animation. Each animation must have a music or sound track of your choice.

Principles

Applying principles of motion graphic design to your animation work will make the motion you create more naturalistic, more appealing and more easily understood by the audience.

Motion design principles can be broken down into the following areas:

- timing: spacing actions to define weight and size

- speed of change: spacing of the in-between keyframes to achieve natural movement

- arcs: the visual path of action for natural movement

- motion blur: to enhance appearance of motion

- squash and stretch: defining the rigidity and weight of an object by distorting its shape during an action

- motivation/anticipation: preparation for an action

- follow through: termination of an action

- overlapping action: establishing its relationship to the next action

- staging/exaggeration: presenting an idea so that it is unmistakably clear

Questions

i asked a few questions when the brief was established and found out several key points.

• the animations should be related to the principles of motion graphics. focusing on showing certain ones of them in each animation.
• one of our lecturers suggested that he think characterization is something that they are looking for.
• the animations do not have to be linked.
• colour pallet is a very important part of this project.

this brief was inspired by the bupa adverts.

though we do not have to make it have a narrative and it can be purely abstract.

thoughts

• i want to establish principles that an animation will show before i think of the design and style of it.
• i would like to make use of textures and lighting, though as i say above i will not implement this for no reason.
• tv idents are my inspiration for the structure of the animations.
• i'm interested in doing 3 completely different visual styles.
• i need to keep things simple, as i only have 4 weeks to complete the project.