Incidental Animation

I've been working some incidental animation effects into the space frames between my animations, so that rather than just seeing a black screen for a few seconds between each one there can be a variety of transitions which help with the overall effect. I'm influenced in this by what I saw at the Benedict Drew show, which involved a number of transition effects -coloured bars floating across the screen, text, and realised as soon as I saw them that this was a way to make my overall presentation much more interesting. Below are some screenshots of the first one I've created. Its the second frame of the reel, and gives the viewer a textual input of the three core concepts involved in the work.

 

 

 

The animation techniques involved are basic Flash timeline work, creating a symbol, within the symbol creating a motion 'tween, and then placing the symbol onstage, but the devil is always in the detail -in this case making sure that they all travel across the screen at the same speed, and align nicely at the end. Then it was just a matter of writing code to stop the "playhead", and adding a new layer with the text in a keyframe above where the 'tween ends. Its necessary to place the text in a keyframe so it doesn't appear until the very end of the tween.

I think these effects are important to the overall look of the piece. I have chosen, [with one exception], to use black backgrounds for my animations, so anything which breaks that up and gives some colour to the work is, I think positive.