Animation Test...

When I came to start my final piece, I realised using "The Golden Age of Cartoons" was a lot of information to fit into a 30 second timeline... So I'm going back to my original idea of using the first pieces of technology that became the roots to developing animation as a technique. This is because the information is simple to portray, easy to follow as a chronology, and a simpler task for someone who hasn't made a motion graphic before...

I decided before going any further into making my final animation, I should do a test run first. This will allow me chance to experiment with Photoshop and After Effects to try and produce what I want, since I've never made anything like this before.

These are the steps I took to make my timeline on Photoshop...
I firstly drew an ellipse, which helped me to keep my lines evenly spaced and the same length all the way around.
Once I had drawn all the lines I need, I removed the ellipse, and was left with the third image down. After this I was able to rotate the whole page around, so I could align my images the right way around, ready to be rotated.
In order to be able to rotate my image across a timeline in After Effects, I created a video timeline on Photoshop, then elongated the length of every frame to 30 seconds. When exported into a film, this will open well in After Effects; allowing me to put in a centre rotation point, and add in key points to work out the speed of rotation.


















Once I exported it and moved it to After Effects, I was able to change the scale, position, anchor point (rotation point), and put in key frames every 3 seconds to make my image rotate around the centre point.
I could either elongate the space between every key frame, making it move slower in a continuous motion, or I could make it rotate faster and pause at every piece of information.

After watching it back I realise I need to think about the composition and actual images used, so they all stay on the page and don't become blurry when zoomed in. 

I also believe that I need to pause the timeline every time it reaches a new piece of information, since that will make it easier for viewers to read and see the information.

This is my first test of rotating the image:

I will experiment further to see which speed works best, improve the composition in Photoshop, and see about adding some kind of title.