This was my very first time working with AfterEffects. The assignment was to take a metaphorical prompt (mine was combustion) and abstract it into a simple story, animated through AfterEffects.

I attempted to use hand-drawn images imported from photoshop, to mixed results. While frame-by-frame animation would have probably looked much better, I did not have the knowledge to pull that off, nor would that be feasible given the time constraints. Thus, I used the puppet tool for nearly all of this.

Unfortunately, the models deform unnaturally at several points in the animation, and some of the movements really feel stiff and awkward. Further, the metaphor does not come through as well as it probably could have. The greatest strength here is probably the cute drawings I did, but those alone will not make this a great product. This is a first try, nothing more, I suppose.

This was the first “Personal Geography” map I created, and is thus probably the weakest. We were to map our way to school (if we did not live on campus), and one of the bigger problems I kept running into was the simple fact that I have no sense of direction. I don’t drive, myself, and I can’t very well describe how I even get to school. I just sort of understand my way as a series of images. I tried to present this idea, but the map overall came out sort of sparse and confusing.

I was having a bad month at the time, finals and all, and given the title I wouldn’t submit this for any kind of showing. The idea was to organize something using a time element, as well as aspects of the events we were organizing chronologically. I chose my finals, which were fierce, and their relative difficulty.

I believe this project needs more space, vertically. I wish I had, in retrospect, put a key for the various symbols, and maybe even made a sidebar that showed all of the days these things were due, so that I may have had more precise placement of the items on the bars.