Creating my opening animation

Using Photoshop for frame-by-frame animation

(top image: working on the animation in Photoshop. Bottom image: quality of finalised GIF when placed into InDesign document)

To start off, I thought using Photoshop's frame-by-frame animation would be most effective, as I would be able to manually manipulate how something moves, by each frame.

However, I fell upon many issues using Photoshop for this particular animation. Firstly, as Photoshop rasterises images, when I tried to flip the A over frame by frame, I had to stretch it partially each frame. Due to it being rasterised, with each move the A become more and more pixelated, until it was basically destroyed. Another issue was the fluidity of the animation. Using photoshop, I could not get the animation to run as smoothly as I would have hoped. This was possibly partially due to the fact that I was manually moving each object frame by frame (including increasing transparency), but also due to the exported quality of the finalised animation. The GIF file didn't come out at the quality I had hoped for.

Firstly, in the second image above, you can see that when the GIF was placed into InDesign, alot of the quality was lost. Secondly, the GIF export on its own (seen below) ran at a very low framerate.


Final GIF exported from Photoshop (below) [click to view larger]:






















Using InDesign's animation abilities for built-in animation

I decided that if it was possible to create the animation within InDesign, I wouldn't have to worry about exporting externally and then importing. In concept it was a perfect idea. However, this was not the case when I attempted it.

Firstly, I could not find an animation preset that would allow me to swivel the A and make it reflect. After spending quite a large amount of time researching if this was possible, I couldn't find any solutions. Therefore, I decided to leave out the swivel animation and just start from the next movement. At first, making the A and N move apart worked quite well, and so did the fading in of the rest of the logo. The fade in animation preset, is arguably the best InDesign has to offer.

Unfortunately, when it came to refining and tweaking the final position of the A, InDesign started to show some flaws. I would spend almost an hour trying to find-tune the end point of the A, but no matter how little I altered the motion path, InDesigns ePub previewer showed me that the motion paths are not as precise as I hoped.

It was at this point I knew I needed to use a program built for full motion animation.


Using Motion to create my animation as a video file

Having previously used Motion on an animation project, I knew that it could achieve what I wanted. The second I started altering timelines in it, I knew that it was perfect for this opening animation as it allowed me to be precise and control timing perfectly.

Additionally, Motion has the ability to rotate an object around a z-axis, which meant I could use my original storyboard again. After exporting the animation as an MP4 I was extremely pleased with how it turned out.


Final Animation (created using Motion) - some quality lost on blog due to upload compression