Am I supposed to be writing this? No. I am supposed to be writing Part II to my bioinformatics post. But here we are, and let’s just accept my foolishness and move on.
But here is an overview of my experience making this animation, based on my previous infographic. It has been a ridiculously long and interesting journey, to say the least.
It all begin one fateful day when I decided I should try and make an animated version of this. So, like some naïve innocent, I opened AfterEffects, loaded in my Illustrator graphics… and watched it all fall apart.
I had a fancy star-patterned background in my infographic. In AE? Well, all I had now was a grey blob. Cool, I’m sure that’s what I wanted. Next, my layer system was a mess. Everyone knows naming layers, ordering layers, are general best practices. I would be lying, however, if I said I followed those best practices.
This Illustrator document though was bad even for my standards. Each element was thrown in randomly, layers were unnamed and unsorted, and everything was a mess I couldn’t even understand.
So, back to basics I went, spending more time than I should have ordering, sorting, naming, cleaning those layers. Cool! They’re now all named and orderly and grouped in an amazing fashion.
So back to AE we go! Imported everything into AE, fidgeted more with the layers – since AE layers function differently from AI layers. Well, sort of – except genius me didn’t bother converting the AI layers into AE shape layers, and so I was just manipulating AI layers. Which is inefficient, to say the least.
Nonetheless, this technical inefficiency didn’t impede me until much later, and I managed to isolate my spindle fibers, link them to the chromosomes, and make them move. Wooo, animation over – it all moves. Hahahahaha.
Well, I ran into my first roadblock when I tried to make the cell divide. Except I had no clue how to make things break or warp or be fluid or anything more complex than moving and rotating. So I picked my brain for a while and came across the ingenious solution of manipulating my cell’s path and making it all smooth and nice.
Except then I discovered that you actually cannot manipulate the path of AI shape layers in AE. Yes, I’m dumb – but I shan’t make this into a me-roasting post, okay? Deal with it.
So off I headed to YouTube and discovered I have to convert them all into AE shape layers to do… stuff with them. Oh well. That would mean I have to redo every single thing I had hitherto done, but so be it. With a great deal of patience impatience, I redid all my previous work, except now with AE shape layers.
When I finally finished doing the chromosomes again and reached the cells, I discovered that in fact, my artwork is all wrong for doing whatever I was attempting to do. I tried any amount of stupid fixes, hoping to somehow, magically fix the artwork and make things work. Unfortunately, this was not possible.
At this point I rage-quit and left my animation for a good while, doing other stuff in between – bioinformatics projects, courses on my to-do list, a Magpie Inkcap FBF animation… and other stuff. Eventually though, I remembered this deserted project and returned to it, this time taking a fresh start.
I left all my previous artwork, and referencing the ol’ faithful YouTube, managed to get my cells to divide. Given this was the hardest part so far, my spirits were buoyed and I bravely headed to the old AI file, with the aim of reintroducing the chromosomes.
And I managed it! I had to redo most of the artwork, but in the end, the chromosomes were here, they moved, they did fancy flops with their chromatids, all nice and amazing.
Until I realized I used the wrong chromosomes. I was making a meiosis animation. The chromosome should have already done recombination. Except my chromosome were most definitely not recombinant.
Then I decided that if I was going to be reanimating this part, then I might as well animate cross over itself. Should be simple, right? Right…? Hahahahahahahaha.
I decided also that I did not like the classic… er, embracing chromosomes used in meiosis animations, and decided I’d have them socially distancing whilst gingerly exchanging parts of themselves. That’s probably a good deal of artistic liberty I took here – I am not sure how this actually goes about in the cell. But I was too averse to the idea of cuddly chromosomes to even consider it.
So cool, I had the idea – now only animating it remained. I am going to gloat over the fact that no YouTube referencing was done for this step, and I managed to achieve it with a similar method to what I used for the splitting cells.
I should probably mention that I did this in a separate AE project because I had no clue how to go about doing this within the cells splitting one. Once I managed to get my chromosomes to do their COVID-protocols-compliant cross-over, I headed back to my initial cells and fidgeted with the layers until I figured out how to merge the two together.
I went back and forth a bit at this stage, sometimes importing the cells into my chromosomes and sometimes other stuff until I finally figured out how to sensibly import the chromosomes into the cells. Then I reordered the AI files to make the layers workable, and deftly engineered the individual chromosomes to join the party just as the precomposed recombination ended. Woohoo!
Then I managed to make it look fancy and zoom in by clunkily scaling the thing up and down. But whatever, none of this was known for its elegance, anyway.
After reanimating – for the umpteenth time – the chromosome in their correct, recombinant state, I was finally done! I did some minor corrections, tweaks, etc. but eventually called it done on this infuriating project.
It was done… and I didn’t like it, to be honest. It seems clunky, the recombination process doesn’t look as nice as I imagined it.. But it’s finally done, and maybe someday when I’m better at animating I can redo this.
But, thus draws an end to my troublesome animation. Now, I had better go finish Part II of my bioinformatics post. Yeah, yeah, I am going! Be patient, won’t you!