sometimes you hit the flowstate and everything’s hitting, but other times you’re blanking on how to do the most basic thing… here’s some mistakes I’ve made while animating. Who’s to say that any of these were made recently…

duplicating a comp only to realize I didn’t ACTUALLY duplicate it

ah yes, the old duplicating and then changing it, to then backing out to the main comp and realizing…

Duplicating in the layer panels just copies the same comp, NOT copying and making a new one.

remembering that mistake and creating more comps than I actually needed to… 

In this recent project, the concept was a line of text with the one in the middle changing fonts. Every word save for the middle would move.

I just needed to think about it for a second and realistically only needed two… rather than making five. Since only one text would change, the other four could be duplicates of the same word that didn’t change.

literally forgetting how to do things I’ve made before

Perpetual movement graph – where an object ‘keeps moving’ to keep perpetual movement. This effect is to make sure whatever’s moving doesn’t ‘stay still’ when it’s technically finished with its overall movement.

I was staring at this bad boy and it wasn’t working… until I remembered that the curve has to be continuous/non-interrupted. more like this:

Why this works: most of the movement happens in between the two keyframes to the left (the two points on the curve. Small increments of movement happens in the last part of the graph curve, hence it being labeled as ‘perpetual movement.’

Most of these mistakes have happened because I either was working really late at night (more like morning) or was not feeling good… motion really takes a clear brain because of how complex it can be.

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Will I ever make these mistakes again? Probably. Hopefully less now that I’ve actually written about it. See you in another rendition of motion talks!