100 Days of Motion Design

Creating animation is time-consuming. I broke the creative process down into four steps and aimed to complete them in two days.

I collect motion design inspiration from Dribbble, Behance, and Instagram on a daily basis. My growing Pinterest board has been my go-to place for inspiration.

I created the illustration and imported it into Principle or After Effects. Keeping the design file well-organized can significantly speed up the importation.

I animated the illustration and exported the final animation as a short video. I posted the video to Instagram with the hashtag #100daysofmotionbytx

I created my first animation by watching Principle—Simple Character Animation (Jumping Donut ).

I watched the video tutorial in 1.5x speed and tried to create the animation from memory.

I studied other people’s work on Dribbble frame by frame and then came up with my own idea. 

I rebounded Bouncy Fruits by Deekay. I deconstructed his work to study the “Squash and Stretch” animation principle.

Repetition is the key to reinforce a newly learned skill. I intentionally re-applied the skills I learned to create new animation.

Halfway through the 100-day-project, I took a day to read <Adobe After Effects CC Classroom in a Book>. I was able to connect the dots by revisiting the learned skills in a more systematic way. I also discovered new techniques that I wanted to try.

Some of my work was inspired by my favorite games and movies. Some of my work was inspired by other people’s illustrations. I created artwork to promote type Thursday Seattle — a monthly design Meetup that discusses Work-In-Progress projects.

The Idea-Driven approach has kept me motivated and pushed me to discover new techniques. To make my idea of flipping book come true, I found a Tutorial on Openyourbook. To make a cup of Pumpkin spice Latte, I found a Tutorial on flat 2d smoke clouds.

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes the cognitive bias in which people of Low-Ability have illusory superiority. The more I became aware of my own incompetence, the humbler I became.

In Internet culture, there is a “1% rule” that describes the participation rate of an internet community: only 1% of the participants of a community actively create new content, 9% of the participants edit content, and 90% of the participants only view content.