For my final animation blog post, I’m going to conclude what I learned about 2D animation this semester.

Learning a new software is akin to learning a new language or skill. It takes practice and does not really work if one merely learned via verbal instructions! This was especially true for something that seemed as technically daunting as After Effects. Initially, the overwhelming amount of controls intimidated me a little. However, its challenging and complex interface was also the thing that motivated me to play around with the controls. Maneuvering around After Effects eventually got better and faster, which meant that I could allow myself to be more ambitious about what I wanted to do with it.

For the final project, my classmate and I started off with a generic idea with beats of the story already set up. Whilst doing it, I believe we changed our story or the way we wish to illustrate it countless times due to either time or our lack of adequate skills. After pulling all-nighters and spending many hours working on the project to come up with a minute short, we both had so much more respect for animators out there who could/have to create content so efficiently and exquisitely. Their patience and tenor with doing such work is truly admirable! In the end, we were proud of what we achieved in a short period of time, taking into consideration that it was our first attempt at creating an animated narrative short.

All in all, I think one major takeaway from this course was that animators have to have a lot of resilience and patience. The actual process of animation is nowhere as glamorous and exciting as what its end result could be. This is because when people talk about animations, they tend to think of Disney or Studio Ghibli movies. They don’t tend to talk about the tedious work behind all those animations, i.e. the frame-by-frame tedious handwork, the countless iterations of a single character, the secondary expressions on a character’s face, so on and so forth. Hence, after gaining insight about animation’s history and its actual process, I am more appreciative than ever of animated work. Sometimes/every now and then when I see a piece of animation, I ask myself how the animators did it and how/whether I can pull it off…