These 2 past weeks I have been effectively working from home on my fmp. I found it very useful and I managed to concentrate very well on the project and on the problems that needed solving.
I managed to finish the painting last week and started on the animating in After effects. Since I already have experimented with After Effects, I knew exactly what I needed to do to animate the painting the way I wanted to. In the beginning, the animation was only 9 seconds long, but I have decided to change it to 30 seconds instead, to make it more enjoyable to look at, as well to stop the choppy end and beginning (since I could not loop it properly because of the way I animated the beginning and end).
I had a couple issues with the way the puppet tool pins appeared on the timeline and was very puzzled why they linked the way they did, but I managed to overcome the problem by just trying to animate the pins without having had to undo any of them. It proved to be a little more difficult than I expected but I am very happy to have managed to overcome this small obstacle.
I have also found out that by double-clicking on a layer in After Effects, it brings that layer to a new window and it makes it a whole lot easier to animate because you don’t have all the background and other elements to get in the way/ distract you. It also makes the animation not as blurry when moving a pin (the program does this to cope with the CPU being used- it means it’s loading the movement).
Maggie's sketchbook 