One Minute Animation Loop
Post-Mortem
I learned and enjoyed a lot in the process of making the animation. One major lesson learned during the process is to live with constraints. Almost every asset and every action are chosen after trying something else but failed. For example, I spent a long time trying to find more delicate leaf and tree images, or creating by myself, but it did not turn out well. So, I tried to keep all assets in the same “cartoon” style instead of more realistic and delicate. I tried to use puppet tool for more complex actions for transport belt and arms, but it also did not result well. Although I tried and failed many times, it turned out that most things worked out at last, maybe not exactly as what I imaged. The whole process was also a bit easier when I noticed all those constraints, as I could narrow down my design and had more concrete expectations of the result.
Though I succeeded in taking advantage of several cool effects in AE, such as remnants and Gaussian blur, I finished most part of the animation with the most basic actions like rotate and position changes. It would be wonderful if I may explore more built-in functions in AE, I might be able to achieve a lot more than what I have now. The problem was I do not how much could AE do, and I would love to learn more about the fancy animations in AE in the future.
To moving forward this animation, I think there are many actions and details I could add. For example, I could show how the leaf is equipped to the twigs, how the leaf is “blown” to increase its size. Although I do not have exact ideas about the scenes to animate these actions, I think it would be really fun to continue on this imagination.