"Catching Fish" is the final assignment I completed for the Expression Session course offered by the School of Motion. I learned a secret weapon for motion designers during the course: animating anything in After Effects without keyframes by writing code. I was surprised at how powerful this technique can be. It made me realize how easy it is to achieve the desired result using expressions and how difficult it can be to achieve the same result with keyframes.
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FUI is designed in several panels animated without keyframes
• Wind speed around the boat should randomly change.
• Wind Direction is the direction that the wind is blowing around the boat.
ID random fishes indicate all of the fish our boat can currently detect.
Target Fish represents the current fish that we’re trying to catch.
The distance from this fish to the boat will determine which fishing rod to use.
This is our boat!
Gauges: Oil/Volt/Fuel/Speed
Diagnostics: displays various data visualizations of different elements around the boat.
Rod Selector: You’re in a boat. There’s a fish somewhere over there that you’re trying to catch.
What rod do you use?
Cross Section: This is a map of the underwater terrain below our boat, both before and after our boat.
From here, I took it to a cinematic level, adding more HUD elements and screens, compositing, and title design to look like an intro to a movie.
The HUD is made by several blocks/compositions and compositing in a single Master panel.
