When I first learned the After Effects program, I did not think it was very fun to use. I struggled with some of the features during the lab and assumed that I would probably just hand-drawn my animations on Adobe Animate. However, when I decided that I wanted my project to be a concept with Legos and Squish mallows I realized that using After Effects would be much quicker and easier, and would allow me to better create what I was imagining. The first thing I did was shoot all my videos, which was one of my favorite parts. After that I worked in chunks, adding audio to the film, creating animations of one scene, adding audio to those clips, and then making more animations of a different scene. I ran into issues when trying to make the Lego animations. I kept on trying to do walk cycles, but for some reason it was not looping. I looked up tutorials, went to the Lab directions, and retried many different times to make it work and figure out what I was doing wrong. This was extremely frustrating for me but i pushed through! For many of the animations i decided to move the people manually instead. This made everything flow more smoothly and I started to feel more accomplished. I think that my animations were very strong despite my challenges. One thing that I think I could improve upon is making smoother transitions from scene to scene. I feel as though giving the clips time to turn into one another could make it feel less choppy and rushed in certain spots. I also think that some of the audios were a little boring, or were too quiet / loud in relation to other audio files. Overall, I am very happy to have stuck with After Effects and am proud of what I created! It was certainly a learning experience!
