Exploring 2D Animation

Sometimes inspiration just hits you out of nowhere to start something at 10pm, and that's what happened to me the other day.

I was in the depths of YouTube when I came across this video:

(Marriot, B. 2019)[1]

A video that isn't out of the realm of things I watch onto a day to day basis, so why was it so special?

Initially, it was the art style of the thumbnail, the clean shapes and basic shading that didn't feel so basic because of the texture. When it comes to my own art, it wasn't something I had ever attempted to do, or even thought of. I was intrigued.

However, watching the video didn't inspire me to create an illustration in a similar style, instead the explanation of how Marriot animated the blobs at 1:04 inspired me to try animating.

Now, I'm not new to animation by any means. I've had a go at it, in fact I have numerous blog posts[2] that go over my process for a whole project I did at university last year. The main difference is that was all 3D animation - this is 2D animation.

2D animation has always been something I'm a fan of, I have a lot of nostalgia for the medium - old Disney movies are definitely being the biggest culprit for that. But being a perfectionist never really lead to that way of work, 2D animation usually means drawing a lot of rough drawings before you anywhere near clean linework.

As I've gotten older, I have made progress on not worrying about my work appearing perfect before it's even finished, but the idea of needing to rough out multiple frames of the same thing for possibly hours and then needing to go back and finalise each of those frames just seemed like too big of a task to take on.

That's because it was.

I've always been far too ambitious with the ideas I want to bring to life, an example being animating people, which I still lack the experience in drawing once let alone multiple times. Drawing blobs is much more of an attainable task for me to complete and so I made a start and this is what I managed to come up with:

Considering it's my first attempt at 2D animation, at least in my recent memory, I think that it manages to get across what I wanted, which was droplets forming into one bigger droplet.

I did add a little bit of pizazz to this animation by turning it into an intro that could be used for a YouTube channel, similar to Marriot's intentions with what he made.

I'd like to try doing more work like this in the future with a bit more preparation, like making a storyboard to work off instead of jumping in and working from my brain. Hopefully, I'll be able to create something even more impression next time.

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Bibliography

[1] Marriott, B. (2019). Animating a Youtube Intro - Motion Design Workflow Tutorial. YouTube. Available at: https://youtu.be/-warfcjazzE [Accessed 2 October 2020].

[2] Hussey, A. (2019). Introduction to 3D Computer Animation. [online] Available at: https://aprilmhussey.wixsite.com/aprilhussey/blog/categories/learning-3d-computer-animation [Accessed 2 October 2020].

TipTut (2016). One Mask for Multiple Layers | After Effects Tutorial. YouTube. Available at: https://youtu.be/M8HPnuoX03k [Accessed 2 October 2020].

Ignace Aleya (2018). Write on Text Reveal Effect in Adobe After Effects - TUTORIAL. YouTube. Available at: https://youtu.be/D0-ZzBY32ss [Accessed 2 October 2020].