I Don't Want to be Hipster

Oh my goodness, I didn't think I'd finish, but here it is.

Things I learned:

1. Animation takes a loong time! I seem to have forgotten that since I took the Geoff's class. It seriously took me almost 2 hours to animate a ~3 second clip.

2. Organization of the After Effects layers is soo important! My .ae file is a huge mess, with 30+ layers, even after pre-composing some of it. I think next time this class is taught, there should be some more time devoted to learning how to organize layers (making different compositions, pre-composing scenes, etc). I could have saved some time if I actually thought out the relationships between different scenes.

a screencap of the whole mess..

3. Syncing music with animation/text is haaard! I was animating several scenes in Flash so I imported the music clip into Flash so I could animate to it. Then I exported it without sound and had to resync it with the music in After Effects.

4. Textures can make a huge difference! I did all my animations in black and white so it was boring as hell, but add a few textures and they look a lot better, I think. I just searched for cool high-res texture pictures online. And changed the blending mode and opacity to make it look cool.

I ended up deviating from my original idea of magazine cutouts. I was going to use real photos and animate it in After Effects, but I ended up using a tablet and animating those scenes in Flash, which took up most of my time. Then I imported it all into After Effects and brought it together.

I also figured out pretty quick that animating the whole 2 minute song would take way too much time, so I did text animating instead for maybe half of the song.

So this is Kathy's song "I Don't Want to be a Hipster". You'd think I'd get annoyed after listening to it so many times, but I think it just gets catchier and catchier. I catch myself singing it in my head a few times a day now... "i don't want to be a hipster..." O_O

I Don't Want to be a Hipster from Chiang Leng on Vimeo.