Freedom isn’t gluten free.
This took around 60 hours.
40 in Illustrator, 20 in After Effects.
The video file is too big to upload here so click the little linky.
Tdl;
- The things in my project that worked really well
Giving myself a small pat for actually finishing this. That is further than I was expecting, so that’s pretty cool. Also, the things that I think worked well were that the clouds were the one thing that actually looked cool both in drawing an animation. The clouds are the best part of this whole piece.
- At least 2 things to add or improve on next time
I would like to make the all the assets, save for the beta fish, are more bigger so that you can see the amount of effort and time I put into those Ethereal walking animations. From such a distance, you really cannot see all the detail. Another thing that I would change would be to just like, not have beta fish. I would have liked to have just animated the stars to have a twinkle instead, that would have looked better, less busy and would have worked with the type of flow I was aiming for with this animation.
- At least 1 thing you did not do well
You see those jagged moving beta fish? So sharp, pointy and just plain cringe. Those fish are very poorly done and do not compliment the elegance and grace that beta fish have with their royal fins and smooth movements. Also since these are all male beta fish (You can tell from the tails), all 5 of them would be ripping each other’s throats out right now because they’re territorial fish – Unrealistic work here.
- What was difficult? What was easy? (referencing tools, techniques, styles, etc)
Drawing is always easy for me, I found that drawing the background and choosing the colours were not that challenging because colour theory is our dear friend. Also, since I know a small life hack on how to make clouds, I thought that making the almost invisible 15 circles was pretty easy, too.
The difficult part? First time that naming was difficult, actually. Each fish has a meaning behind the name and I needed it to be just right. That was pretty challenging, along with placing them in the designated spots on the canvas. As always, animating is difficult, let’s just move on.
- What was the most fun vs most frustrating.
Art will never not be easy for me, sure there are challenging aspects to art but like, I enjoy all types of art and am willing to learn – Just like how I learned to make objects appear in 3d! That was super fun and I didn’t even use any references or tutorials!
Frustrating? I am still banging my head on a wall as to why I didn’t animate the sun or stars. Why didn’t I do that? I don’t know! I’m disappointed with myself that I didn’t though. Also can we all agree that at this point, animation with this program will be a bane to my life for the time being?
- If I were to do redo this project from scratch I would…
Say goodbye to the beta fish completely, yeah. They didn’t really fit at all with this project but I had to fill in negative space and so the five beta fish were added. I don’t know why I did that. I would also not animate this and just leave it as is. It’s fine just being a still image, I think animating this kinda ruined the whole aesthetic – At least the way I animated it.