Information Design — Exercise 5: Vector Animation

23.02.2025 - 07.03.2025 / Week 4 — Week 5

Chan Zhi-Ren Zenndan / 0369069

Information Design / Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media / Taylor's University

Exercise 5: Vector Animation

Table of Contents

    1. Instructions

    2. Process

    3. Reflection

1. Instructions

Fig 1.0 Module Information Booklet

Exercise 5: Vector Animation (5%)

Exercise 5 is a task that involves animating the designated SVG files provided by Mr. Kannan. The animation should feature smooth transitions and timing, aiming to “bring the vectors to life” within a 5–6 second timeline.

2. Process

Since we had a practical class yesterday, I had an understanding of the task given. Fig 2.0 shows the animation practice we did yesterday.

Fig 2.0 Vector animation practice

Mr. Kannan had also assigned us what files we were to work on. Fig 2.1 shows the file assigned to me.

Fig 2.1 Assigned file

Looking at what I was handed, I thought of animating:
  1. Clouds (big and small, speed)
  2. Sun (scale up and down)
  3. Turbine fan (rotate clockwise)
  4. Trees (shaking leaves)
  5. River (wiggle)
To start, I had to ungroup everything and separate them into their own layers.

Fig 2.2 Layers imported to AE

Next, I repositioned the anchor point of the fan and added a rotation expression to the fan layer — time * 200. This allows the fan to continuously move without adding any keyframes.

Fig 2.3 Animating the fan layer

Then I did a simple left-to-right movement for the clouds, but I made sure both sizes had different speeds so that it looked more "realistic."

Fig 2.4 Animating clouds

Another thing I applied from class is the wiggle effect. I set these on the "trees" layer. It took a few tries to get the speed and amount of wiggle correct.

Fig 2.5 Adding wiggle expression to trees

I did something new for the river, which is adding a "warp" effect from one of the settings. The effect can be found by navigating to Effect > Distort > Wave Warp. Below are the settings that best work with this layer.

Fig 2.6 Adding effects to the river

And as for the sun, I just applied a simple scale effect to give it a "pulsing" appearance.
Fig 2.7 Animating the sun

Fig 2.8 shows the final vector animation.

Fig 2.8 Final Submission

3. Reflection

This short task was fun to do, and I can imagine how it could be used in future projects. I hope to learn more about these layer expressions, as I found them very useful for completing this task. It also reminded me of the infographic vector videos I used to watch back in the day, and I now have even more respect for those animators.

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