Abstraction in Animation

What I love most about animation is it's ability to articulate complex ideas and messages through abstraction and excess. Think about the cartoons you watched as a kid, how in moments of reactions characters faces would fill up the screen often to a disgusting degree to capture how they personable reacted to the events before them.

Take for instance captain K'nuckles in this clip of Flapjack. See how this joke wouldn't play out as well if this was live action. It's not just the hi-res reaction that makes this clip, but also the distortion of time we here in the Capp's voice. He is truly enraptured by the maneuvers of this  playful pup.

Now on to another example. There are many parts of the animation posted below that I think are executed flawlessly. The restricted pallet, the movement and design of the Jumper, the expressions of his face. This to me represents a near perfect execution, and the best part of it all is that every single detail is an abstraction of reality, and yet all the while we are able to form a cohesive narrative from it. 

 

Analyzing Motion Graphics

This past week my favorite record label, Spinnin' Records, released a preview to a new song by Alex Kenji and Leon Boiler.

What I find really fun to do now that I know more about After Effects is to watch videos and try to analyze what they did.  It looks like they put a wiggle expression on the camera to make it shake throughout.  There are also a couple of color flares thrown in here and there that are pretty easy to make in After Effects.

Something I would love to learn how to create are all the "straws" that form the portal around the :48 mark and seen throughout.  They seem to be effected by the sound of the music so their animation must be parented to the audio.  Also at 1:02 and 1:08 the rotating portals are really fun to watch but I guess they were made in Processing and not in AE.  I make that guess based on their similarities to the fractal pattern at the end of the Casino Royale opening.  But alas!  I will see what I can figure out in AE.