Motion Graphics

Inspiration

In the summer of 2019, I discovered a blog post titled 100 Days of Motion Design, in which a designer named Tiantian Xu decided to challenge herself to create 50 Motion Graphic Designs in 100 days.

I loved the simplistic styling of imagery, the beautiful color palettes, and the usability of moving design in a digital world.

I set up my own little 2-week challenge to create motion graphics every day. Along the way, I learned many things. Here are the key takeaways and rules I like to follow when creating a new project.

It's All About the Moo-vement

One of the most important things I learned when designing motion graphics is that the movements need to flow together in a natural way. Not necessarily a completely realistic way, but a believably realistic way. It's not enough to just chart a straight path and hope people understand. Acceleration, gravity, and reorienting oneself must be present in a gif for it to make sense in our minds.

For example, in this gif, notice how before the UFO departs with the cow, it reorients itself and turns in the direction it's coming down in, even going backwards a bit as if to gain speed. While not sound physics, it gives the UFO personality and makes it seem like the aliens are deciding where to go before returning from the way they came.

But there's still a lot to be improved. I think the cow could be much more realistic, don't you?

By animating the cow, I'm not only able to bring the cow to life, but also demonstrate another core physics principle: gravity. When the cow moves upwards, it's being pulled by its center of mass. Therefore, in our faux-physics world, the cow's head tilts down and the feet move together.

But where's the sense of the UFO being a surprise supernatural spaceship?

When an object comes to a stop, it doesn't typically move at a steady pace. First, it must decelerate. And since aliens have no speed limits in space that we know if, we can safely assume they are speeding in there.

In After Effects, this is done with an effect called bezier curves. This mimics the natural starting and stopping motions an object might make and truly makes all the difference.

Would you believe me if I told you that the UFO is travelling in exact same amount of time in this last one? It seems a lot quicker due to the way the curves are set up.

Linear

The linear, unrealistic pathways are the basic movements that are created with After Effects

Bezier

Bezier curves create natural-loking movements and can be refined to be faster at the beginning or end of the movement.

The type of physics we're aiming for can best be understood by watching people and things move and over-exaggerating a bit. The extent of the exaggeration often determines how comedic or serious your animation style is.

It’s like concept of “cartoon physics.” When Scooby and the Gang are running away from a villain, they don’t just start out running at full speed. They have to build up momentum first. But rather than showing a slow acceleration, it’s more comedic to show them running in the air for a few seconds before shooting off.

Similarly, an object or character falling off a cliff doesn’t simply fall straight down. It usually jumps up, decelerates to a stop–often one long enough to realize where they are and take a loud gulp–before plummeting to the earth.

Keep it Simple

While including many colors can look beautiful when exported to a video, simplicity is key to creating a beautiful gif is to minimize the amount of colors you are using and stay away from gradients.

While I loved this design, the gif is streaky in appearance, as I didn’t initially realize gradients wouldn’t render well in gif form.

This gif looks a lot cleaner. Despite changing the style of the graphic a bit, it effectively conveys the same information.

Dimension

One way to work around the limitations of color is by using highlights and shadows. Simple shapes on the sides of an object can emphasize the shape and give your animation a three-dimensional look while still maintaining simplicity.

These three methods are highlights, shadows, and morphing & overlapping

Dimension #1: Highlights

While it’s pretty clear this is a gum ball machine, the image is flat and boring. The spheres could also appear to be bouncy balls instead of gum due to the matte finish.

A few subtle changes can create the appearance that the gum balls are real and are truly inside of a glass sphere. Even though I only made a few minor changes, this also pops off the background a lot more due to having a larger dynamic range

Dimension #2: Shadows

Shadows are another way to easily add dimension to your photos. They can make shapes come alive, make animations feel more realistic, and breathe life into any living creature (or those in the afterlife, we're not leaving the ghosties out).

One of the best things about shadows is that they give you another object to animate. Which, while it is more work for you to do, is also a way to trick the mind into believing your animations could be real.

This image is flat and there isn't very much to animate. While I could have the ghost fly all around the screen, I wanted to focus on the subtle movements of a ghost who's the star of the show. Though the ghost is moving the same distance, it seems like it's hardly moving at all in this rendition.

The image is much better with shadows on the lettering, ghost, and ground. Plus, the ghost is much cuter and more realistic.

With a ghost or an object that moves up and down, the shadow gets smaller as the object moves closer to the ground and larger as the object moves up away from the ground. Not only is this cute to look at, but it's fun to animate as well!

Now the only question we have to ask is do ghosts actually cast shadows?

Dimension #3: Morphing & Overlapping

Items that either come out of, go into each other, or morph together serve to create dimension and add interest to the motion graphic.

These effects are done with adding tons of keyframes and using masks to make objects appear and disappear when it makes sense.

In this image, a few things key are happening that make this so interesting to look at:

The Orange and Blue Dot:

The orange loading label and blue water start out as spheres that drop from the sky and morphs into the desired shapes. The orange text expands out of the circle as the circle shape disappears. The water and its highlight both start out as spherical shapes and morph into long rounded rectangle shapes.

In the end, the animation morphs back to its original state of one large blue circle and one small orange circle. The blue dot swallows the orange dot up before continuing its way down and washing everything off screen.

This allowed me to create fun movements, start and end on a blank screen, and create a satisfying loop. I don't know about you, but I could look at this animation all day!

The Duck:

The duck pops out of the water in a motion that looks like it's truly buoyant due to over-shooting its path before coming back down to water level. Moving the duck from behind its mask where it was hiding allowed for it to suddenly "appear" on screen when it was not visible prior to the water being there to hide it.

Along its path in the water, it bobs up and down, the bottom of the duck remaining "underwater"–or in reality just behind the blue water shape.

The duck dives underwater at the end as though it's aiming to catch something. It pauses for a second before diving in as if gathering breath, which was really important to the believability of this motion graphic.

Practical Applications - Mountain Hawk Film Productions

Motion graphics have been helpful in creating small animations for Mountain Hawk Film Productions to include with my video work. For example, the ghost animation above was the intro scene for a short skit.

In addition, I've also animated our show's logo and small parts throughout some of our episoded of our production called Mountain Hawk TV. The logo was created by club Vice President Matthew McClain and animated by me in After Effects.

This animation was designed to fit in with music for more natural transitions between segments of our show.

As you can see in this following clip, the animation leaves time for the music to naturally overlap the previous clip before beginning. It then keeps in time with the music until the end.

The jackpot visuals were created in illustrator and animated in Premiere using masks and keyframes. The loop of comments is simply a very long image that repeats and slows down when it gets to the desired comment.