Digital Animation with Experimental Techniques

Digital Animation with Experimental Techniques

“Now that we have successfully made an experimental animation, and went through this long, tedious process, we now have a final render, so congrats! It was my pleasure being your teacher, and I hope you have enjoyed the course. Now that you know a little more about experimental animation, I am curious to see what your mind can imagine. I hope to see lots of textures, beautiful handmade mistakes, lights, shadows, flatness, volume, and colors that make you happy! For this project, I have decided to animate a cube because of a dream I once had, but feel free to animate anything you wish, no matter the source of inspiration! I find that dreams are a great source of inspiration, so you could dig in there. Remember that you can abstract your ideas as much as you want! You can make something busy, as well. It is up to you. So before saying goodbye, let me break down for you the benchmarks of my project. Use these as a reference of sorts, or even as a checklist of things you have to include in your final project. First, after getting familiar with the tools and materials, I went in the seek of references. Books are my main source of inspiration, but you can use whatever suits you best, or even combine different sources. Instagram, for example, has built-in functionalities that allow me to save lots of pictures. Consider as well sites like YouTube and Vimeo. Aim for references that are both dynamic and static. Once you have your idea set, you can take matters to Cinema 4D, which is what I do with my morphing cube.

In Cinema 4D, I like to start with a base form and then work my way up from there. Set your background and make your shape's panels editable, so you can colorize them. Once they are colored, you can then manipulate the shape of your form. As you could see in the course, I chose to twist the cube. Deformations and camera rotation are what is going to "animate" the composition. Render it, afterward. The individual frames that are in the render folder are now to be processed in InDesign, the next stage in the process. What I like about InDesign is that you can play with the layout. By creating a grid or grids, I can place the frames that were previously rendered in Cinema 4D. Number your pages within the grid's boxes so you can export is a PDF to have it printed (inkjet, if possible). With the hard copy of the frames, you can start illustrating on top of it. Feel free to go in any direction you like as far as the color palette goes. My choices were inspired by past works of mine. Since I used acrylic, I first mixed it with a drop of water until smooth. I painted the background first, with acrylic. I recommend that you start first with the edges. There's no need to be perfect. You can retouch any imperfections at a later stage. Once you complete the background, you can get to work on the shape. I used pastels for it, rubbing a little with a small brush. The frames are now ready to be scanned and transferred back to the computer. I usually make sure I have selected the whole page and that the resulting image is of the color type (usually by selecting "Color" or similar in your scanner). Also, scan all pages in high resolution. The third software to use now is Photoshop, which is where I am going to open the images that I scanned. The trick here is to superimpose the PDF over the scanned images. At this stage, what I do is to have each frame in separate layers, centered and aligned, so I can have all the frames on top of each other, in sequence. From there, the only thing left to do before exporting the composition is to clean them up and adjust any color imbalances. Remember, however, that frame cleanup is not mandatory. It depends on the project and your goals. When color correcting, I prefer to use After Effects. I wish you the best of luck and hope I’ve sparked your interest in mixed media techniques! I will be available in the forum to review your work and answer any questions you might have. I will do my best to respond promptly, but as I’m sometimes busy, it might take a little for me to respond, but I will get to you as soon as I can! It would be great if you could also give each other's work some thumbs up in the forum. Support among fellow artists is so important and needed. It would be great to have a supportive dynamic within everyone’s work and feedback. Also, we always learn from different people’s perspectives! Goodbye! ”

Partial transcription of the video

“Congratulations, you've reached the end of this course. I hope you've enjoyed it. Let's look back at what we've done together. We started with talking about different experiences and inspirations. These are great materials to kickstart your creative process. so you can produce your own unique creations. I mentioned the differences between working for a client versus working independently. When working independently, you have more freedom to experiment and express yourself in your own unique way. Working for a client can also be a very satisfying and fulfilling experience. You can get better...”

This transcript is automatically generated, so it may contain mistakes.

Course summary for: Digital Animation with Experimental Techniques

• Level: Beginner
• 97% positive reviews (117)
• 3920 students
• 4 units
• 15 lessons (1h 57m)
• 1 download

• Category

  3D & Animation

• Software

  Adobe After Effects, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop, Cinema 4D

• Areas

  3D Animation, Animation