Project 2 follow up on After Effects and my Process

This wasn't the first time I had to change my idea for a project because I realized quickly it was way too complicated when learning a new program. Unfortunately it probably won't be my last. My original idea had the camera (viewer) moving back in Z space between different scenes. For some reason at the time, I didn't even consider the depth movement and how we're only working in the X and Y axis; that was completely stupid. So I took the same content and just put it on a horizontal X axis movement. So my idea turned into an idea of almost a scrolling scrapbook in the mind of a child. There is a foreground, mid-ground and background (sky) all moving at different speeds. It starts off with a scene of a sketchy city in the distance and then scrolls along a "stitched" countryside into a forest area where a tea party is set. For this project we only had to have the first 10 seconds animated. At the bottom of the screen in a "dirt" layer is a rabbit who moves along the bottom to the end of the scroll where there is a hole for him to exit unto the tea-set.

Some problems I encountered early was this project I made for myself allowed for me to get really comfortable again with Photoshop since it had been awhile since I had done more than a little cutting out. I found it hard not to just make the project but to order it in a way that when I import it into After Effects it would work. It was 10x harder to figure out than I originally thought it was going to be and required a lot of backtracking a tweaking. Once I finally had the files built and structured in After Effects I learned that for it work that I shouldn't ever have grouped folders in Photoshop. For some reason it just makes things go a little crazy; a least my experience told me. What I ended up having problems with for some reason is editing the position points along the timeline. When I edited the position of one asset and then decided to edit a second asset, for some reason when I played it back it was if the original asset was never touched even though I was sure I didn't highlight both of them. This lead to a lot of tedious backtracking that in the end left one of my assets extremely jerky and off balance. It seemed like every time I'd try to edit the position points or start the asset over it either didn't change or made things worse. I wonder if I have some sort of mode checked that is making the program do this, but because I'm such a novice I've have no understanding of what's going on. I found that it was extremely difficult to even get my assets open and in the correct camera view when it should have been relatively easy. I almost wonder if I should just start over from the beginning with the After Effects file and see if it works better a second time instead of trying to edit in possibly questionable preference settings of this current file.