This project was definitely a challenge, but I’m happy with how close I was able to get to the idea that I had. The bowl of soup comes in as if pushed across a table to the viewer, and then the letter pops to the top of the soup. By far the hardest part was getting the rocking of the bowl at the end of its movement to look natural, and then finding a sound effect that would fit that movement. The rocking ultimately took quite a bit of trial and error. For the sound of the bowl moving, I ended up with a sound of a glass being pushed across a table followed by a rolling beer can, both of which I found on freesound.org and edited for timing and to remove the room tone. Finding music that felt right took a while, but adding the music and bringing in the type in time with it really pulled the whole thing together for me.
Monthly Archives: May 2025
I enjoyed the animation project, it was a lot of fun learning the basics of After Effects. For this assignment, I took the fish from my Gemini Publishing logo and made them swim around, accompanied by water drops.
To begin, I used the pin tool to create a puppet effect on the tail and fin of the first fish. Then I changed its opacity on the timeline to make it appear like it’s coming up to the surface. I made a copy of this fish layer and reflected it to make the second fish. I changed the opacity of this fish to make it come up later in the animation. Combining these two layers made it easy to make the fish swim in a perfect circle because all I had to do was rotate the object 360°.
For the text layer, I wanted it to have the same effect like it were coming to the surface, so I put a mask on it and changed the feather to do this. The “water drops” are created using the radio wave effect. I messed around with a lot of the settings to manipulate the shape of the waves, notably the expansion and frequency. I changed the life span of the wave so that it would fade out like the ripples in water. I added a distortion effect to this layer to make the fish look like they were underwater, with how their shape was being contorted by the water drops.
The audio was pretty easy to do. I faded the background music in and out in Audition, and I cut up the original audio of the water drops and placed them in the timeline to match up with the ripples. This was my favorite project this semester.
Logo Animation
The idea behind my animated logo was already planned. It seemed petty obvious to me that I had to animate the ladybug flying into frame and landing and morphing into the final logo.
First, I had to make some adjustments to the actual logo to get separate parts that could be animated. I adjusted the clipping masks and moved each part onto its own layer.
Then, I had to figure out a way to incorporate the middle stylus part into the animation, so it felt like it had a purpose and wasn’t just there. My idea originally was that the stylus also resembled bug antennas, but I had to figure out how to animate those where they would end as one piece. I decided that my best option was to triple that element, animate two of them as antenna, and animate the other one as the middle of the stylus. In-class, we learned how to animated elements to seemed drawn on and that was the perfect way for me to animate the middle part rather than just having the opacity rise from zero in its place.
I found the ability to animate a composition within a composition very useful. First, I animated the logo’s parts in its own composition; this consists of the antennas wiggling and the wings rapidly flapping. Then, I animated the logo’s position, scale, and rotation in the larger composition to make it fly around the composition.
I scrolled through music and sound effects for awhile to find the ones I liked. I wanted the music to be whimsically but not sound like a fairytale, so that left limited options. It only seemed right that the sound effect would be a flying bug, to make the ladybug seem more realistic.
I really enjoyed this project and had fun learning more about using After Effects. This semester was my first time using After Effects, and this was only more second exposure to it ever. I never though I would get into animation, but know I have so many ideas how I can incorporate animation into my advertising composition and portfolio work. I believe this will elevate make my work stand out and i am excited to build even more skills within this application.