Motion, says Harrington, radically departs from animation paradigms. “Usually, you work from keyframes. That goes back to traditional animation techniques, where the lead animator draws the major poses and the assistants fill in the motions between them. Most CG applications still work that way — the artist sets the standard positions of the characters, and the computer fills in to get them from one part of the screen to another.”

Motion, however, “takes a totally different approach. You have these behaviors — spin, for example — and you select your object and tell the program how much you want it to spin. You can grow or shrink objects, simulate attraction or repulsion between them, fade them in or out, throw them. It’s a much more natural way to animate.”

“As soon as we were able to open their minds to a new style of animation, they started seeing results that excited them.”

“These behaviors are what really make Motion unique,” continues Harrington. “You can set up relationships that have such complex physics behind them. An object can emanate gravity to pull something closer or repulsion to push it away. Motion does these incredibly powerful natural simulations of how elements move and interact. The engineers who designed Motion are geniuses.”

Time To Learn

The opportunity to learn Motion’s new paradigm was his strongest motivation for taking on the project. “We decided to do this job not because the client had a bunch of money, but because it had a long timeline,” he says.

In that time, he says, “we forced ourselves to use nothing but Motion for the ‘Soulmates’ project. We wanted to push it, to see what it could do. You discover for your own workflow and skill level what it’s capable of. We kept drilling down and surprising ourselves with what we found.”

A Kickass Product

The first challenge was getting his team to change horses. “Our people are used to the graphics packages and motion graphics tools we’ve had for a long time,” admits Harrington. “So we said to everyone, ‘It’s okay if we feel uncomfortable at first; once we get over that, we can gain a technological advantage over our competition.’ And as soon as we were able to open their minds to a new style of animation, they started seeing results that excited them.”

It was well worth it, says Harrington. “Apple put together a great team of engineers and designers to make a really kickass product. With Motion we can do things faster than with other tools. It’s not a toy or a gimmick. We see Motion as a new power tool in our toolbox, and we love it.

Harriington appreciates Motion’s ease of use but what he especially loves is its power. “We have very demanding clients,” he says frankly. “And if we’re going to integrate a new tool in our shop, we have to know there’s more to it than just templates — that it has the power to go beyond what we’re doing now. So we kicked Motion really hard. And there’s a depth to Motion that you don’t see right away. As soon as you stop thinking in the old keyframe mentality, you can explore that.”

Going Beyond Design

Explore they did. “We went way beyond just using colours and textures to process images,” says Harrington. “Putting light rays on a video clip is a design element, but it’s not the whole point. We said, ‘Let’s work in HD. Let’s throw in 10 textures and 40 objects. And let’s use behaviors for organic movement.’”

The animator even used Motion to enter new dimensions. “Motion lets you combine traditional 2D approaches, scale and distortion to simulate space and depth,” he explains. “We made many shots appear as if they were built in 3D space — so they look like objects moving toward you from far away. We did that by using optical scaling tricks, pre-composing some elements, animating individual pieces, layering them, applying movement and adding scaling to the layers.”

Harrington lists his favourite features: “We love the text animation — Motion does everything LiveType does, and then some. The particle system is wonderful for creating backgrounds and textures. And the compositing lets you put together rendered elements really fast, which is nice because we can bring in multiple animations and combine them.”

Faking Camera Moves

Harrington notes, “It’s very fast to build an element and then modify it, and you often get real-time performance. This is exciting for designers, because it encourages you to try new things. Other packages can do some of these effects, but when you try them in Motion you’re amazed at how fast the results are.”

With Motion’s flexibility, Harrington says that they were even able to “fake things like camera moves, which you technically can’t do in Motion. The way Motion is designed, the camera stays dead centre, then you throw things left or right, or they scale and float through the scene. But we were able to put animated objects inside a layer, then animate the layer to get movements that resemble traditional camera moves like zoom, pan and dolly.”

Next page: Slipping and Sliding