Animation and After-Effects workshop by lecturer Sarah Nesteruk, (Wednesday 26th of October 2016).

In reflection and consideration of this wonderful workshop, conducted earlier today  I will attempt to articulate some of the work that we covered during the four or five hours that a group of similar minded creative individuals came up with in response to the suggested exercise of re-articulating and interpreting the play by Samuel Beckett "Not I".

Sarah explained the importance of our role in trying to help reinterpret ideas of perception and the way that we see the world. That is, the object external to ourselves, and "I".
For example in Beckett's play "Not I", it is all about the focus on the "mouth".

It was agreed by the group that we would limit our colour palette to images and text of black red and white, and this would be the format for any creative work that we produce.

Dr Nesteruk showed some animations in contemporary practice, by for example "Tomato", - an advertising agency, who also created further pieces such as "No Hope", on behalf of Radio Scotland.

In the above examples, it is the current fashion to create what is known as kinetic typography. The particular animation that was shown to us starts with the text idea "I think I'll be Drug".
The animation is a very effective way of getting a message across to a viewer.
The text and video combination of the spoken word are incredibly powerful. The objective, in trying to create such animation and videos is how to add character to the text. In another example "What Barry Says" which is a textual animation through the website video, written by Barry Robson.
Another might be "Knife Party" a further animation by Barry McNamara.

Todays' workshop created an animation sequence project. This was a concerted activity, with each of us creating individual vignettes which were linked together to form the whole play of Samuel Beckett's "Not I".
For this to connect appropriately and efficiently, each scene will need to have a start and finish of 'a black box'.

The simple format of the high definition template was the usual 1920 x 1080 pixels. As this is going to be used for a broadcast type activity on the web then 72 dots per inch with square pixels, is adequate.

It is important to create a specific assets folder that is unique to the project that you are attempting to achieve. This in itself was a very useful learning from this exercise in reflection.
To create the After Effects video, I used the "import file" action from the navigation bar to select the project folder and my assets, which were then "imported as" a composition which retained all the attributes of the layer sizes.

I was then able to create a new composition with those assets.

It can be found here....Part 20, - "Not I"