Explaining Stuff with Images that Move

I'm a public health & book crusader: unlicensed volunteer librarian at a NYC elementary school, a mom, a writer.

I'm fresh off my infographics course, learning how to visually communicate things. Now I get to add some movement to them!

Keeping "keep it simple" in mind, I decided to do an explanimation for my kids to understand how I work.. Which is as simple as.... I need my coffee. I drafted a storyboard (uber simple), then set to draw the art. My first time doing this in Illustrator (I've only used vectors twice, for the infographics class). The idea is:

Mommy wakes up dishelved and cranky. Can't function. Coffee brought to her. Coffee pours into her cup. Mommy transforms smiling, put-together, optimistic and ready to conquer. Sound effects will be coffee pouring into cup, then an angelic AAAAAAAAH at the end.

Challenges:

Most of the time I'm using Illustrator, I'm thinking: why am I doing this? I can do it quicker and faster with a pencil. Perhaps I can use a stylus? I should try that. Meanwhile, I spent most of the time trying to figure out how to make shapes, remembering things from my infographics class. If I got something close to my shape, I stuck with it, knowing it was imperfect. I wanna get to the animation part! I kept the "keep it simple" in mind.

Later on, I found out there were buttons for preshapes like arcs. I liked the pencil best! The pen drives me crazy. I couldn't find the scissor button so I could snip a circle into two like I did for my infographics, and randomly used the lasso tool (have no idea what that does yet).

So here are my assets

(cranky, unkept mommy; pre-coffee face; pre-coffee hair; post-coffee face;post coffee hair; coffee pot; mommy body with table and coffee cup (grouped); coffee pouring down in air; steam; rainbows; stars; coffee pooled in cup).

Fresh off a Saturday Morning Cup of Coffee...

I decided I wanted more animation options. So I added more facial features and stages of hair transformation. I also discovered a way to make my pouring coffee have movement by applying a different texture to the wave of coffee and playing around with the details of the wave line. So slight movement can be seen. Part of me wants to draw a bird singing as the coffee reaches the pot... The new challenges are: I don't know how to undo a zig zag line, so have to redraw lines, and I don't know how to export new assets. I'm not even sure if I need to have all my faces complete versus I overlay them later. Rather than dwell on these details, will wait until I do Class 2 and adjust as needed.

and because I finished my homework early...

We were supposed to keep it simple and stick to like, 10 assets. But in the end, I had over 40... Not all were used, and this is because since this was my first time using Ae, I had no idea how animation software worked. In retrospect, how I approached this was old-school: make a billion little pictures on pieces of paper, staple them together, and FLIP REALLY FAST. So my assignment doesn't take full advantage of key framing, which I understand is technology meant for you not to make a billion little pictures for movement.

Challenges: My Nemesis Postioning & Key Framing

Illustrator's little devil was the pen. I had similar problems with the positioning tool tucked perniciously under sublayers of clickdom (push the arrow down into Dante's Inferno to Transform, then, like setting a bomb to all your hard work, click that stopwatch: BOOM). It was only when we had the live lecture and I saw our teacher use the positioning tool properly and I saw the points suddenly elongate like a light saber while the cursor went in an entirely different direction did I realize that the Positioning feature is a nasty cousin of the Illustrator pen. How beautifully our teacher made that leaf fall. No such elegance from me on my animation. The two objects I successfully used key framing for were the coffee cup and the coffee pot. G*d knows how I did it because I couldn't replicate the same movements for my credits in the end. My main problem is I can't make an object stay, no matter how many times I studied the instruction video. You don't know what far galaxies my assets flew to that I had to retrieve again in the process of key framing. How many times I zoomed out looking for those suckers swept away by the evil Positioning tool. Many a times my assets were like amateurs performing in the Apollo Theater, utterly failing and suddenly hooked away off stage by the quality clown.

The other challenge I had is not knowing how to start with a woman with a face, then changing that face. Not understanding how to layer, we start out with one asset with a preset face/hair, then you see a little blip in the Matrix when you get a new asset of her face and hair changing. From then I learned how to layer (stick those assets that stay the same on the bottom of your list) and then just changed the facial features and hair. I also didn't know how to rotate (see paragraph about nemesis Positioning Tool) so found myself just manipulating stuff in Illustrator and bringing in the new asset. Clearly, I have lots of learning to do.

But you know what? In the end, I DID IT. It might be messy. You might see that my cup and coffee pot handle don't have transparency so you see background from Illustrator. I would love for the steam in my coffee to be moving. Indeed I might tinker with this some more. But guess what? My kids find it hilarious, and they were my intended audience, so: WIN! I'd love to work on this more, but there is only so much World Cup TV I can stick my kids in front of to watch as I fight digital wars with Positioning & Key Framing buttons. Already they are obsessed with that Spectrum commercial where you superimpose your own face on a soccer player's body, and thus, that is my next animation assignment. By the way, Spectrum, did you know that I am canceling you after World Cup so that I can afford my Adobe subscription? No joke.

Prelude

Even though my explanimation (spoiler!) tells you how mommy works is with coffee, the real truth is SLEEP. And so, we must make another one... (my poor, almost done, #3 novel...)

My kid did a parody...