Animation in Layers
Goodness me, it’s the 4th of July and I intend to go jump in a pool and play in a little while. But first I wanted to pop in and say a few words over here. Lately over at Sapling I’ve been pretty consumed with an animation that I’m putting together over there. It’s been a whole lot of work, and it’s nearly finished now. I get excited at times like these.
The animation is about the translation process. From a technical standpoint, it’s been interesting how much time I’ve been spending in the program, After Effects. I usually do a little compositing there, but then have generally brought my work into Final Cut Pro or something like that to finish up the actual shot arrangement. With this one, I’ve found it made more sense to actually just put the whole thing together in After Effects. I’m having to be really careful about organization and use a lot of pre-compositions. And even so, I don’t believe that I have ever taken on this many layers of video to wrangle for another project in my entire life. That’s the thing about animation though I guess. You literally make all of it from scratch.
One thing that I don’t care for in After Effects as opposed to your more editing and less effect driven software, is it’s insistence that every little thing have it’s own layer. This has been one of those pieces for which I’ve wanted a lot of layered subtlety going on behind the scene. It would have been nice to be able to dedicate a couple of tracks for that, rather than adding a new one for every piece of footage used. That being said though, After Effects does a great job at handling image sequence footage and you do have a great deal of control over a lot of details. Still, if anyone from Adobe happens to read this, maybe the next version could at least give us the ability to group tracks into folders. For when you don’t quite want to create a pre-composition and send your tracks to another timeline, but you still want to clean them up a bit for viewing sake, or to add some sort of matting to the whole bundle, just that one little thing would make After Effects so much better in general.
I especially thought that when I got into the part of this animation that I like to call the breakdown. Textbooks often use similar static illustrations to represent things that may or may not atomically look like the molecule in question. And really it’s only rather recently with the work of Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan (video link to a lecture of his about the ribosome and translation process) that we even fully know the exact structure of the ribosome. So one of the things that I’ve been excited to do with this one is to create some more standard looking images and then layer them over the 3D animation. I then keyframed the individual components to follow their 3D counterparts so we can actually see the connection between those representations and a more 3D space. I have been simultaneously irritated with myself for coming up with such a time consuming and intricate thing to create to tell this story, while also really psyched to get to break everything down so clearly. As it’s come together, every codon in the 2D overlay has had to have it’s own layer in After Effects, but now that I finally have everything placed and animated, I’m really excited about it. Back in school, I recall one of our teachers, John Daugherty, telling us about how every piece that you do has to have that thing that makes it really interesting to you as an artist. Whether it’s a concept, or a technique, or whatever, and I think this part of this animation is that for me. It’s something that I don’t see other animations doing, and for me it’s like wrapping up that little aha moment that you get when you’re watching these sorts of things and you finally figure out how one representation relates to another and start to get what it is that you’re seeing.
As you can see, though, I’ve got these huge blocks of layers in the timeline there. At one point, I had more than 60 in there, and that’s with many of them being pre-compositions that lead to more layers in another timeline. But it’s working. And I just love it when things work.
This is going to be a good one.