Yesterday I got a note on social media from a conspiracy theorist minimizer complaining about the messaging in my art. It makes me feel good knowing this film can make minimizers skin crawl. I wanted to finish this shot yesterday, but I started going cross eyed late at night.
Several issues remain and they relate to the difficulty of using After Effects. I thought that rolling a ball would be a simple task using transform tools. I accomplished the ball roll in Callipeg but noticed that the ball had become insanely pixelated when I saw it play back in Premiere pro. It turns out that any time you rotate or scale an object in Callipeg it becomes more pixelated.
So at the end of the day I was trying to re-animate the ball roll in After Effects. Sliding the position of the ball is easy, however rotating the ball happens around an anchor point in the center of the screen. that anchor point can be manually moved to the approximate center of the ball but when I go to the next key frame the ball moves to the center of the screen where the anchor point was first located. I wrestled with the setting for about an hour with the ball flying off in all direction. Who knew that animating a quarter inch ball roll would become such an issue? I gave up in frustration and went of bed.
Since there is no printed manual, I will be watching a slew of youTube videos about the rotation tool with few of the videos addressing the issue. I did tackle this issue before with the wood chipper scene. I just have to figure out what I did. So my goal for today is to roll a ball a fraction of an inch. Time to face the digital hydra.