Ultraviolence – I Am Destructor video

I told you that there would be more from that thing I was playing with yesterday!

The blobby effect is made by hand-drawing a graphic animation loop of around 18 frames with the blobs moving around on the spot. This is easier if you turn on the onion-skin option (the button that looks like two little squares on top of each-other just below the timeline). You then put the loop into a new graphic-clip and put another keyframe on the timeline 18 frames later with the blob-loop motion tweened to a new position. Put an empty keyframe after the end of the loop (frame 19) otherwise it will start again. Copy those frames and into a new layer and move them along one, so the first frame of the motion-tween is now frame 2. Repeat this, staggering the first frame by one until you’ve got an effect you like. I chose to do eighteen layers for eighteen frame clips, but that’s just a personal choice.

If you have a look at the clip now it will look pretty silly. Because the clips all start and end in identical positions, the individual frames lay directly on top of each-other so there is no effect of movement. To fix this, go through and individually move around the beginning and end positions of the graphic clips. It’s best to keep the beginning points close to each-other if you want a clear ‘point of origin’ for the blobs, but you can spread out the end points over a big distance. Really there’s no hard set rule here, so just do whatever looks good to you.

Now you’ve got a graphic clip of the blobs moving in a very pleasing multilayered way across the screen. For interest you might want to go down into the original blob loop and draw a few strings of dots, the main blob dividing, or to fill in some of them with colours. Experimentation is the key here. I think I’ve got a lot to learn about this technique, but it’s certainly fun to play with!