All that effort for 2 seconds.

Ok, today I worked on an animation in After Effects. I know that there is much I have to learn in this program that will probably speed the process up, but holy crap! I spent 4 hours over the last two days putting the individual frames for an animation in place. Essentially I am trying to animate a guy singing a song. The song is already recorded and the pictures are already drawn, but getting each mouth movement to line up is tres difficult.

In your typical movie or cartoon what you see is a series of pictures flashed at you so quickly that it gives the illusion of motion. That is pretty basic. Most everyone knows this. There are typically 21 pictures per second, sometimes more, sometimes less. I was going with about 30 frames a second. So in a song that is two minutes and 15 seconds we are looking at about 4050 frames. However, there is not a lot of action going on in this short film so each picture lasts about 3 frames. That is still 1350 individual frames that have to be placed perfectly so that the animation gives the illusion that my character is singing the song.

In 2 and a half hours I have managed to place, with some degree of accuracy, about 25 frames. So essentially I have finished 2 seconds of my animation. !!!

I almost said screw this animation thing, but then I realized that those two and a half hours zoomed by and I actually enjoyed myself quite a bit.

Ps. Once this animation is completed I fully intend to put a link to it on this blog. I have no idea how to do that, but love will find a way.