Simple animation idea -what Mac Program?

[porcus-belle]

I am an utter novice with most graphic matters (I do a little Pixelmator stuff now and then but that's about it). I want to an animation for a slide show which I'll try to describe. It begins with a picture of a person and that stays the same. What happens is white letters begin to fall down from above and steadily accumulate eventually burying the guy in snow. What went through my mind (cause I use Pixelmator) is to just make a tedious huge number of still shots, changing the position of the letters a small bit each time and saving each picture. Then I would try to use (not sure if this is possible) something like iMovie to put them all together. Is that feasible and/or are there better ways of doing such animations? Thanks for helping out a rank amateur!

 

[ezekielrage_99]

I'd give Motion a crack, it's should easily be able to do what you need it to. Though there is a little bit of a learning curve.

 

[crunchbox]

Your idea is pretty simple to accomplish with the right software (I'm guessing this is the sticking point).

You can use Photoshop to create a .gif animation of this using tweening for the letter's motion. Equally you could also use Motion, Adobe After Effects, Flash.

If software really is the sticking point and you have no access to any of the aforementioned packages, it is completely doable in MS Powerpoint or Apple Keynote.

The term you need to understand is "tweening". I can't explain it as well as a million others surely have on the interwebs. This will save you heaps of time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweening

Hope this helps..?

----------

I super-quick search of "animating in Keynote" found this link

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Keynote/4.0/en/c5kn4.html

 

[porcus-belle]

Thanks

Thanks to both responders. I'm on that learning curve abour Tweening and software options as a result.

 

[SatyMahajan]

I am an utter novice with most graphic matters (I do a little Pixelmator stuff now and then but that's about it). I want to an animation for a slide show which I'll try to describe. It begins with a picture of a person and that stays the same. What happens is white letters begin to fall down from above and steadily accumulate eventually burying the guy in snow. What went through my mind (cause I use Pixelmator) is to just make a tedious huge number of still shots, changing the position of the letters a small bit each time and saving each picture. Then I would try to use (not sure if this is possible) something like iMovie to put them all together. Is that feasible and/or are there better ways of doing such animations? Thanks for helping out a rank amateur!

Fastest way would be:

1. Create files for each of the 26 alphabets. Create one for your person. All files should have an alpha channel (i.e. transparent background)
2. Use After Effects + Particular and create 26 particle emitters utilizing one of each of the images above as the source. Make sure gravity is active and the particles are moving downward. You can adjust some of the parameters to make it swirl a bit (to look more like snowfall).
3. Make the composition 3D.
4. Create a floor layer.
5. Tell each of the 26 Particular emitters to user the floor layer as a floor.
6. Set the lifetime of the particles to be long enough that accumulation occurs to hide your image.
7. Profit.