Animation: text part 2

 In this blog post I will explain how I have created the text that is opening my animation and the text that is ending my animation. I thought about what I discussed with my tutor and how I can easily create a link between my posters and my animation my just adding things that are handwritten. We also talked about how I could add some sort of introduction to the environment and the story. 

I decided not to be too direct with the introduction, but to kind of present the problem. I also decided to animate the text as if it was being written on a piece of paper with a black pen or a marker. 

To make it seem like all of the letters are written down, I needed to gradually add very small elements of them on frames. To speed up the process I was drawing a line with my right hand and then with my left hand I was pressing the arrow down on my keyboard to navigate to the next frame and then I was pressing "D" that stands for Duplicate. I had to duplicate the previous frame to be able to draw on it. If I did not duplicate the frame I would had to write everything on every frame by hand and that not only would not be effective at all, but also would not be very neat. It would be messy because it is impossible to actually write everything in the exact same way hundreds of times. I decided to create two notes at the beginning of the animation, to just kind of introduce the viewer to the situation and then one note at the end that would be kind of a conversation opener. 

I decided to make those animations in a different file than my main animation, because I have noticed that due to all of the changes I have made, my animation got a little messed up. I had some movements in places I did not want them and some of my corrections were not in the right places. I saw that therefore I had to fix the animation and decided not to touch it anymore because the process of fixing those little bugs not only takes a lot of time but also is very tiring for me. 

When the note animations were done, I have exported them and put them in IMovie with the main animation. 

I use IMovie because it is a program I am very familiar with and it is free for me. I also intended to use IMovie to add sound and credits at the end, so moving, all I have already worked on, to IMovie was not that difficult and I knew I would have to move it there anyway so it does not make a huge difference whether I moved it now or later. IMovie has many transitions and options I could use, but I think I am going to stick with the simple cuts because I do not want my film to look tacky. 

I think adding the notes was a truly great idea. They connect the animation with the posters and it makes the animation more real. I think I am doing very well with this. I wish I was able to do the writing animation smoother, but I think what I have done is not bad at all, therefore I am happy with it.