A Word In Motion
This project was a class assignment in Motion Graphics I in the semester of Fall 2022. This instructions for the assignment were to pick a work which we could illustrate in motion. For instance, the word "jump" might be illustrated by each individual letter jumping onto the screen.
I chose the word "stilts" and sketched out a storyboard to demonstrate how each individual letter would end up in position in the middle of the screen. This storyboard was also a good opportunity to make sure that I knew where each letter should start so that the word would end up positioned neatly in the middle of the screen.
Once I had shown it to my professor and gotten it approved, I began animating in Adobe After Effects. I used the "l" and the second "t" as stilts for the letter "i," which turned out to be a bit trickier than I initially anticipated. Fortunately, I'd already taken Animation I and done a walk cycle, so I had practical experience with the pattern necessary for the movement of the stilts. However, since the order of the letters is essential to the correct spelling of the word, I had to be sure that the "l" and "t" took a number of steps that would result in the "l" being on the left and the "t" on the right. While the storyboard included an initial draft of how I could achieve this, it turned out to be a bit more difficult than anticipated when actually animating it.
Part of the difficulty was that the rotation transformation necessary for the "i" to reach forward with each stilt in succession had a different angle than my initial sketch. As a result, the letters didn't cover the area from the right edge of the screen to their ending positions in the same way that they did in the storyboard. To compensate for this, I sketched out the movements again to work out which stilt should be extended out first. It took a couple of attempts, but in the end it was a success!