I came up with several ideas that would allows me to incorporate shapes into my design. The idea I chose to go with was dance. I decided on three dances, Ballet, Street/breakdance and Tango. I thought that by choosingthis, the music would be fairly straight forward to pick for each one and it would be a challengetrying to portray these dances using shapes. I looked on youtube for ideas on the types of actions that I could do with my shapes, and it was handy that Strictly come dancing had started as that would give lots of inspiration. Next I needed to pick my music, I picked the Nutcracker for my Ballet animation, La Composite for the Tango and Acapella by Kelis for my street/break dancing one as it had a good beat to it. I onlyneed 15 to 20 seconds on each track so I put them into Adobe Soundbooth to cut them down to a shorter time, which I could then inport into After effects. Below is a screen shot of Nutcracker in Soundbooth. Once I had my tracks ready I was then able to do my story boards so that it would match the beat etc.
I did most of my artwork in Illustrator, just drawing circles etc, I found it easier to do it in there then import it into After Effects. I began with my Ballet animation. I wanted to create a light airy effect, as ballerinas are very floaty and light on their feet. I used Squash and stretch in this animation to try a create the effect of jumping. Below are some screen shots of squash and stretch.
Below is a couple of screen shots from my Ballet animation, I wanted to create a mirrored effect, as if a ballet dancer was in the studio dancers in the mirror, so I wanted to create a refection image. To do this I made a composition half the size of the one I was working with which was 1280 x 720 so I created a new composition which was 1280 x 360. I then made my shapes do thier movements in this composition, once I had done that I copied the half size one across onto the normal sized composition and duplicated it and reflected one so that would produce a mirror image of them selves, and all the keyframe movements etc would match.
I found that creating these animations was hard, the things I had originally come up with I found that were a little out of my league to do in the time we had, I needed more detailed knowledge of the programme in order to fore fill these ideas I had. Perhaps now I know the basics I would be able to have a go at them. Here are my finished animations.
I think that my three animations are good, seeing as a I had no prior knowledge of the programme, I feel that the ballet one is perhaps a little bare and could have done with more going on. The Street one I was fairly pleased with, I like the spinning of the shapes as the music builds up. The Tango one I feel I have portrayed that it is two dancers and the moves that they are doing relate to the type of music and dance it is, but again maybe I could have had more going on with in the composition.
