THROUGH A LENS: Development

After a short period of research, I decided that I would build up on the 2 second animation that I already had. First, I made this basic chart to visualize my idea.

I was planning on making the 20 second frame-by-frame animation (at the time I did not realize that I chose the hardest path) so I calculated the number of frames I had to do. then I divided them to 5 sections. WhaT I had in mind was to show my character doing normal stuff (like walking, dancing, eating etc.) in each of those sections, changing every 4 seconds.

Then my idea changed when we had the first part of our augmented reality workshop. And something clicked in my brain. AR was fascinating to me and also an easier way to execute my idea. Instead of drawing all the frames for a 20 second animation, I would make a shorter animation and anchor it to an illustration via Artivive.

My initial idea was to have my anchor illustration as some kind of a “seal on the wall” that gets activated when it is scanned by the AR viewers. Once it is activated, the animation part pops up and the demon emerges from the smoke and winks at you.

I made all my frames for the animation in my Ipad with an illustration app called “Procreate”. Each layer represented one frame.

Usually Procreate has the ability to export your layers as mp4 animation or a gif but I exceeded the maximum layer number a Procreate file could hold. So I had to divide the frames into two files and export to layers one by one to upload them to Photoshop on my computer. Then I followed the usual way to make an animation in Photoshop and exported the merged two parts into one mp4 file of my completed animation.

The next part was to anchor my animation to an illustration. I made my illustration in Procreate as well. So all I had to do is to upload the illustration at one side and upload the animation to the other. 

See the outcome in my next and last post about this brief.