How to add special effects
to your animations

By Dr Alex

Creating animations is great fun: if you have not done it before, give it a try and you will see how much pleasure your creations will give you. It won't take much of your time either. For example, if you just have an old family photo, scan it in and apply few special effects, and in seconds you will have something interesting to show and share a laugh about.

Any good animated effect is interesting by itself, but special effects are not just an excellent source of amusement. They are also a powerful business tool and work wonders when you need to illustrate your point. Special-effect animations work best when they are accompanied with compelling text, or cool sounds. Your design should not be needlessly complex - just have a look at Google.com for an example of a very simple, but effective solution.

To give you some ideas as to what you can do, I would suggest a hands-on experience. I will assume that you are using Animator Professional, but the principles are the same if you have some other animation package.

• Grab your digital camera and make few pictures of the trees in your back garden at different times of year
• Import the images, select Transition Effects, and select Morph from the list of effects.

 

 

• The program will generate a set of in-between images gradually morphing the first image into the second one. Specifying the greater number of in-between steps will produce a smoother animation, but increase its size.

If your pictures were taken at different times of year, you now have an animation illustrating a seasonal change (or perhaps passage of time?), applicable to many situations. Let's say you are selling vitamins through the Internet: having a winter-to-spring morph animation will illustrate how invigorating your product is.
Or, suppose that your company does roof restorations: take one photo before and one after the restoration, morph one into another, and you're done: the contrast will nicely show to your customers what you can do for them.

Another set of must-use effects are distortions. They range from very subtle to exaggerated comical effects. For example, you wish to promote your car-repair services and pass the message that no job is impossible or too hard for you. Easily done - all you need is a distortion or two.

• Import the image into Animator and select the Radial Wave effect. As you change the effect settings, the real-time preview shows you what the end result will look like.

 

 

• It helps to move the pivotal point around (right-click) until you get the effect you like. Below is the same effect with the pivot moved towards the center of the image.

 

 

• By specifying the number of in-between steps you control how smooth the animation will be. The animation below took me around 3 minutes to produce, by combining the radial wave effect with reversing parts of the animation.

If you really like experimenting, try the Freehand Wave. You create the effect simply by drawing your own distortion wave. Adding, moving and deleting points is easy, all while previewing the end result in real time.

Even very simple effects can be used effectively:

Animated Mosaic effect. This one is often used in games: the goal is to be the first to guess that's behind the image as the mosaic tile size is reduced.

Object appearing / disappearing is very easy to do: for an entire image, just apply the Lighten / Darken effects and specify 15 to 30 as the number of steps. If you wish only for some objects in the image to appear / disappear, copy the image, erase the objects, then run the Morph (Blend) between the two images.

An effective variation of appearing / disappearing is the Grow / Shrink & Rotate effect. For an image to grow from scratch to its full size, 2 full rotations are usually sufficient.

Be imaginative - there are many more animated effects that you can use. Most popular ones are transition effects (the effect runs as a transition from one image to another), blur (motion, zoom, radial, Gaussian, or average, depending on your needs), artistic effects (oilify, impressionist), and 3D effects (punch, ripple, bending, cylindrical, spherize). That is not to say that other effects are less worthy. Take for example Swirl and Wave Shear effects and try to think of as many situations as you can when you could use one or both of them.

Putting it all together

• Special effects add a touch of class to your animations, and help you illustrate your point either by subtle changes or through distortions and exaggerations.

• An animated effect can be easily created with just few clicks and the real-time preview allows you to see instantly what the end result will look like as you modify different settings.

• There is a trade-off between the size and quality of your animations. Smoother animations will take more frames and occupy more space. Size may not be an issue (for example, if you are burning your animations to CD's and DVD's), but you are showing/distributing them through the Internet you will need to reduce the number of frames and use Animator's web optimizing tools.

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