Animations can be a powerful way to communicate your ideas, tell a story, or capture attention. But how can you make sure your animations are not boring, confusing, or distracting? Here are some tips to help you create engaging animations that suit your purpose and audience.
Before you start animating, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your animation. Do you want to explain a concept, show a process, illustrate a point, or entertain your viewers? Depending on your goal, you may need to use different types of animations, such as motion graphics, character animation, or 3D animation. You also need to consider the tone, style, and duration of your animation, and how it fits with your overall message and brand.
Consider the platform where this will be shared and the attention span of the end users. A YouTube audience might be more willing to watch a longer animation compared to a Twitter or TikTok audience. This might impact the style and content of your animation!
At this juncture you also want to throw in visual research into the process, especially for character animation. For other projects mood-boards will suffice. You don't necessarily have to strictly adhere to these, but they are useful as an anchor as you go through the design process.
Get deeply intimate with the "Why" behind a project. Know your message and understand your goals. Don't be distracted by shiny filters or cool plugins. Everything must contribute get supporting the main objective.
A storyboard is a visual representation of your animation, showing the key scenes, transitions, and actions. It helps you organize your content, define your narrative, and identify the main elements of your animation. A storyboard can also help you save time and resources, as you can test your ideas and make changes before you start animating. You can use a simple sketch, a digital tool, or a template to create your storyboard, and share it with your team or client for feedback.
This is a good point to take into consideration what is realistically achievable within a specific time frame vis a vis your own skill level. In the event the production period doesn't allow for r&d, then it's worth considering making alterations in order to streamline production.
Don't get hung up on making your storyboard visually perfect. The point of a storyboard is to communicate the ideas, visuals, and message to ensure you, your team, and the client are on the same page. Details can be added during the illustration or design phase. Bonus points - convert your storyboard to an animatic to make sure your timing is inline with your voice over.
The principles of animation are a set of guidelines that help you create realistic and appealing animations. They include concepts such as squash and stretch, anticipation, timing, easing, overlap, and follow-through. By applying these principles, you can add life, personality, and emotion to your animations, and make them more believable and engaging. You can also use them to create contrast, rhythm, and variety in your animations, and avoid monotony and stiffness.
I create animations for more over than 5 years now. Recently I started getting into 2d classic animation that led me to learning the 12 principles of animations. Those taught me so much! They just made me realize how to communicate my animations better and made my work so much better.
The 12 principles of animation are everything. Learn them. Understand why they work and when to break them. Get comfortable with laying keyframes and tweaking them inside of a graph editor. The more you understand animation principles, the better your work will feel.
secondary animations, little bits of consequence that arise from the primary action: things get bumped and wobble, or get disrupted by wafts of air. to feed the hunger for story, add details that show the presence of interaction: wear patterns, subtle damage, decoration, debris, clutter, etc.
The colors and fonts you use in your animations can have a big impact on how your viewers perceive and respond to your animations. They can convey mood, emotion, personality, and meaning, and create harmony or contrast in your design. You should choose colors and fonts that match your goal, audience, and brand, and use them consistently and sparingly. You should also avoid using too many colors and fonts, or colors and fonts that are hard to read or clash with each other.
It's useful to go back to sample colours from your mood boards in Photoshop or illustrator and have these handy as you develop your assets. Alternatively experiment with tools such as Adobe's free online color picker to easily develop harmonious color palettes.
With good design, you won't need to work as hard to make your animations feel good. Understand contrast vs affinity and be intentional in everything you do. Use the contrast of size, value, movement, depth, bokeh, balance, etc. to bring emphasis to the main goals.
Colors influence the viewers mood and feelings. When I first heard this sentence, I din't believe it. Then on one rainy day, I completely noticed it when the sun came out of the clouds and the entire grey pallete transfered into warm orange one. Colors help us tell the story and how characters feel. When choosing a color pallete I use Adobe Illustrator recolor AI generator. Choosing the right font will make the entire difference for your work. It will comunicate a feeling and when you'll see the right font-it will just fit into the artwork. Try mixing 2 completely different fonts, like bold serif with light sanserif.
Sound and voice can enhance your animations by adding another layer of information, emotion, and interest. You can use sound effects, music, narration, or dialogue to complement your visuals, and create a more immersive and memorable experience for your viewers. However, you should also be careful not to overload your animations with sound and voice, or use sound and voice that are irrelevant, distracting, or annoying. You should also make sure your sound and voice are clear, high-quality, and synchronized with your animations.
Balance is everything. Get familiar with EQing the music to make more room for vocals. Balance the music, SFX, and VO. Contrast is king. If everything is the same volume, the message is lost. Be intentional with what you hear and when you hear it. Be mindful of where the spot is playing and master audio for it's destination.
I usually start my entire animations with picking up the music first! The music and the beat direct the vision of the animation and the rythem of the artwork. When choosing music, try to search for specific words that communicate feeling, for example "Abstract". Keep on searching for music, and when you'll find the right music, you'll just know it.
Before you publish or share your animations, you should test them on different devices, platforms, and browsers, and get feedback from your target audience. This way, you can check if your animations are working as intended, and if they are achieving your goal. You can also optimize your animations by reducing their file size, resolution, or frame rate, and by using compression tools or formats. This can help you improve the loading speed, performance, and accessibility of your animations, and avoid technical issues or errors.
I usually use Adobe Media Encoder to render my motion design videos to social media. I found that rendering a mp4 file format with maximum render quality, and 2 bitrate channels on 28, usually creats the best format for social media. To make your video sharp, use the unsharp effect on low values in Adobe After Effects. If you have color bending, use a low value of noise on the animation.
Unless the design of the piece calls for linear motion, you can get a good baseline animation by Ease Easing your keyframes. Even better would be selecting the keyframes, opening the graph editor and cranking everything to the left or right for fast to slow motion. Once you understand these two things, it only takes 60 seconds to get a more fluid animation. Make sure your motion also fits the narrative of your creative. If you have a car speeding off at the speed of a snail or a bird flying at the speed of light. Your creative will feel out of reality.
Think outside the box. Get inspiration from all source of sources beyond animation to create a more unique piece while still making it accessible to the intended audience.