When it comes to creating a simple short animation, it is pretty easy to under-estimate the amount of work involved to produce them. I will certainly always give lots of praise to animators everywhere for their patience to create stunning visual experiences and realise the imagery in their own imaginations.

Whilst it is indeed fun to play around with your ideas, when dealing with a working contract time may not be a luxury and planning becomes that much more important.

“If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my axe!” Robert T Kiyosaki.

Those of you who read my other posts, you may have spotted the trend that I like to break activities into smaller chunks. With this in mind let’s take a look at this short 6 second animation I created for a wedding website.

Step 1: Know the requirements / specification
As this animation was to form part of the complete wedding experience (where guests use a website for RSVP and to share photos and stories), it was important to get the same feel throughout, matching the invitation designs and various other wedding decorations planned. It was this which set the standard of what output I had to create.

Step 2: Conceptual design and selling it
Having been given the graphic and initial design mock up for the invitations by the bride Suzie, that of designer Ian Husbands (who is actually a producer and artist bookings agent), the next stage was to consider how to bring the same imagery to life and animate it.

Here are my brief notes, used to pitch the concept to the bride and groom which secured me the deal.

• Growth pattern simulating extensions from bottom to top, starting with left side branch and then right side delayed, with flowers blooming open.
• Two birds fly in and mount on top branch.
• Titles fade in when animation in final position – timed to be complete as entire composition is complete.

Here it was key that I describe what I had in my imagination and cast the picture in their minds through my descriptions. In some cases for more complex videos I have also drawn it out, comic book style to help with the presentation.

Step 3: Detailed design and design for construction
Now putting on an “engineer thinking cap” (think of it like Lego – you have to build up piece by piece to eventually create your full object), re-watching the animation you may begin to recognise there are only a few unique shapes in the composition.

• Background solid
• Left bird
• Right bird
• Flying bird (i.e. wing flapping)
• 8 point star
• 5 point star
• 3 leaf
• Branch stems
• Suzanne and Lee title
• Secondary title

Using a purchased stock image, separating each element and drawing my own flying motion birds, it was now time to recreate the design matching the invitation. In this instance, I used a low quality scan I had of the proposed invitation design as the reference and recreated it.

Step 4: Animating Process Design
The final part to plan was how to animate it all. Firstly, by numbering the elements in my reconstructed composition, I could determine the order the elements needed to animate and time when.

Then the plan had to cover the exact method to animate the elements:

• For the branches, I used a simple slide reveal effect which I key framed once in a pre-composition and then duplicated at displaced it on the timeline and used different scaling options.
• For the flowers, I used a similar pre-comp and duplicate process with a masking size change instead of a slide reveal with a final short scaling key to give the blooming effect.
• For the flying birds, I had the images swap between each other and use a position key frame to give the impression of movement across the composition. I also applied motion blur to provide more realistic animation and also to hide the fact I can’t draw on a computer very well!

Step 5: Carry out the animating plan and build it!
With my plan in place I was literally able to systematically follow it without further thought. This allowed me to produce complete the actual alignment and keying within a very short space of time, in-fact from getting the original email in the afternoon and having met the bride and groom, by the same evening it was complete.

This is an example of why planning is so powerful – at times like this with limited timescales and when the clients have a very clear idea of what they are looking for, you shouldn’t rely on chance that you may eventually stumble across the final video you want. With a good enough plan, execution of the actions can then be performed without having to worry about what to do next and with video and animations, timing is everything!

I hope you enjoyed this article, please feel free to leave comments below and tell us your experiences.