Watch some cool shit - Sites like
Motionographer,
Behance,
Vimeo's animation & motion graphics category and
SqueezeMe.tv (among many more) are great sites to get inspired. If you just want to watch a bunch of demo reels, there's
Reel Roulette.
Look at traditional design blogs - The core skill when it comes to motion graphics isn't about how well you can use After Effects or Cinema4D or whatever. It's about how well you can design and how creative you can be. Aside from studying graphic design in school or through books, one good way is to look at good examples of what works and what doesn't. Some blogs I like are
Pitch Design Union,
Veer: The Skinny, SmashingMagazine,
The Fox Is Black,
Fuel Your Creativity, and many more
Work on typography - Highly related to the previous item. Type is one of the biggest staples of graphic design and by extension, motion design. Check out sites like
Thinking With Type,
I Love Typography,
TypeForYou, and many more.
Do some tutorials - I know a lot of people like to bemoan video tutorials and ridicule people that use them, but I really think that's short-sighted. What they're really upset at is people who just copy what's done in the tutorial step by step, and then slap that in their demo reel. That sucks. Don't do that. Use tutorials for what their intended for, which is to learn the tools, and also to learn how to achieve a more cohesive and useful workflow. So yeah, do some tutorials, figure out how stuff works in the program, then use that knowledge to achieve your own idea.s Obviously most people know about
Video Copilot. There's also
GreyscaleGorilla (mostly Cinema 4D stuff, but some AE stuff as well),
MotionWorks,
The Pixel Lab (again, mostly Cinema4D stuff),
AEtuts, among many more.
Think about multiple ways to approach a design - Imagine that you're approached by a design client and they have a specific product or service they want to sell, but they have NO idea what the design should look like whatsoever. How are you going to approach it? Many people have a certain comfort zone that they know they're good in and don't like to venture too far from it (I certainly have this problem). Well if you want to grow as a designer, you need to consider multiple avenues, especially when it comes to producing video, and this can certainly be applied to this Mini-Mograph project. You could accomplish your 5 seconds of animation using any
combination (and I stress the word combination) of the following:
- 2D motion graphics in After Effects, Motion, whatever
- 2.5D motion graphics in After Effects, Motion, whatever
- 3D motion graphics in Cinema4D, Maya, 3DS Max, Blender, whatever
- Live action
- Hand-drawn frame by frame animation
- Stop motion
- Puppetry
- Etc.
Maybe you shoot some live-action, then frame by frame draw cool animated bits on top of the video, or you do cool 2D flowy animation and integrate 3D animated objects into the background. Or you just stick with one thing. However you feel would be the most effective design, play around with it!
MAKE STYLEFRAMES!!! - This is something I've had to learn to do over the last several years. When you're working in the industry and you have a client project, and you know what the primary theme is, you never go straight away into production. The pre-production phase is AS (if not MORE) important. It gives you an opportunity to look at the spot from different angles, and gives you freedom to mess up. You come up with multiple looks/styles which then goes onto a client review. A look is decided upon, and then you go into production. Thankfully, since your styleframes are essentially supposed to look like a still frame straight out of your finished video, you probably already have a lot of the work done. Then you just animate. Now, I'm not saying that for the purpose of these mini's you NEED to make styleframes, but I genuinely feel that it's a good habit to get into. It lets you focus more on the design, rather than the animation.
