My initial idea for this animation was to have it set in space, with a shoot star bouncing around an asteroid belt, with stars twinkling in the background. However, after attempting to make a movie clip of a star twinkling, I chose to alter my idea. Not only was I having difficulty with the star, but I also felt that having a shooting star following a guide for 15 seconds would be rather boring.
The idea that I executed is a city going to sleep, and the night sky coming up. It is approximately a fifteen second animation, starting with a bright blue sky and a fully lit city. There are three different layers of buildings, with only the formost ones having windows. Each of these windows is an individually drawn square, laid out so they are all aligned properly. As the buildings slowly "go to sleep," or have all of their windows shut off, there are "z's" that float up the page, conveying the idea that the buildings are indeed sleeping. These "z's" are movie clips, rocking back and forth as they rise. I increased their alpha, making them transparent, as they are not meant to be the focus, just to communicate an idea.
As the sky darkens, a moon follows a guide across the sky, rotating slowly as it does so. I made this moon by making one dark grey circle, and then placing smaller circles on top of it. I deleted the smaller circles to leave holes in it, and then placed this entire graphic on top of a lighter grey circle. This makes it look like the holes are craters, and is just more interesting than a circle crossing the sky. As the moon reaches it's peak, the brightness increases slightly, to contrast it with the dark sky. While this is happening, small stars are coming up in the background, which then are deleted as the sky gets lighter again. There are not very many stars because it is over a city, which means light pollution would make them difficult to see.
I ideally wanted to include light pollution in this animation, but could not figure out how to do so realistically. The closest idea I had was a transparent yellow oval over the city, but this looked more like a ufo than anything else, so that layer was quickly deleted.
When I initially had the sky darkening, there was an obvious change every time the blue changed, as I did not know how to tween this. A classic tween did not work, but my roommate showed me that a shape tween would, so now the sky darkens evenly. It still has a multitude of key frames, but that is because there were particular instances when I wanted the sky a certain shade, and keeping these frames allowed me more control than I had.
The biggest problem that I came up against were the windows. When I originally made them, they were just pale yellow squares, which I thought worked. As I watched the animation, however, I realized that they looked too flat. I made a linear gradient, going from a darker yellow on the left to a lighter yellow on the right. This way it looked like there was a glare on the glass of the window, creating a more visually appealing aesthetic. It was easy to change the windows on the first frame, as I just selected them all and clicked "linear gradient" and it was done. However, as I made the windows go dark initially, I just painted them black instead of deleting them. Since they were technically still there, trying to select all of the windows to change them meant that every window became lit. What I ended up having to do was selecting each window individually to change it. While using the shift key to keep multiple things selected normally did work, sometimes it would glitch and unselect everything I had already clicked, which just provided more work for me. I think it was worth it though, as I definitely like my animation a lot more now than I did when I first made it.
If I had more time, I would probably try to figure out something else to add in the sky before it turns to night time, as it does take a little while for the windows to go out and the sky to get dark. However, I would rather than enough time to work on my website, so I'm leaving it the way it is for now.
EDIT:
I added music to my animation. Now an instrumental lullaby I found on sounddog.com is playing while my animation progresses. I think it helps to convey the idea that my city is going to sleep, and just provides a nice ambiance. Since we didn't really cover sound in class, I had my roommate teach me how to add it!
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