The lockdown's been extended, and the initial presumption back in early March that businesses and schools would be back in operation by April 5 was optimistic in hindsight. Hopefully the warm weather slows down the spread of the virus.
I've been working at a furniture and home decor company called Home Aesthetics for the last one year. I actually hit my one year anniversary working there on April 1st! By being stuck at home, lol. What a way to "celebrate". Still, last week Elizabeth, Vivian and I, the digital team, worked from home, doing various assignments, but as of this week, those were put on hold, as were our paychecks during this time. Welp.
So since I had free time now, Pik Lin thought I should be productive. She's been checking out a creative course website called Domestika and learned some techniques there on sumi-e painting. I've already got knowledge of Illustrator and Photoshop, so she suggested I learn something else that could bolster my skills. I thought about Adobe After Effects, since it's quite a versatile program, and with the constant need to upgrade skills all the time, I thought I might as well. We picked up "Basics of Character Animation with After Effects" by Yimbo Escárrega, as I thought the rigging of body parts along with some basic animation would be ideal. I'm definitely not moving into animation full-time, but having some extra skills wouldn't hurt. Well, it hurt the wallet, lol (mildly, it wasn't too expensive, but any expenses now hurt in general, regardless).
So this afternoon I tried out the first animation assignment and did up a vehicle moving left to right, with a bit of inertia to make it more realistic. It was basically motion tween from Flash! Lmao. More versatility of course, but the general idea was the same. My Flash skills are 12 years out of date, and I only remember a few lines of ActionScript 2, so I guess it's good that I don't remember so much so it won't affect my assignments. When I was doing VisualBasic and Flash, a few times I screwed up by typing in the wrong code, like onClick and onRelease on the incorrect platform. Zzz. Either way, I digress. Pretty proud of my first animation in 12 years! The first 4 assignments are motion, rotation, transparency and scaling. I've made mine all Final Fantasy-themed. Hope the rest turn out nice too.
Got a video call with Pik Lin's relatives in a while, to celebrate Xuan Ning's (her niece) birthday. She's scared of me. Pfft.
