Falling Ant Animation

For this student project, I created a frame-by-frame animation in Photoshop. When I started, I had no idea where it would end up. My first idea, a book flipping pages with a twist, felt too simple, so I scrapped it. So, after some random word picking, I landed on a falling ant for my second idea. The action grew as I animated, without a clear path in mind. This lack of planning made the project more challenging. Instead of animating in groups, I had to move each asset individually, making the process very time-consuming. File size also became a major issue. With over 200 layers and about five assets per layer, my document lagged heavily. Although I managed to fix it enough to keep working without crashing Photoshop, it still wasn't pretty. Another challenge was the quality of the ant itself. During the process, the ant noticeably degraded, likely from being resized multiple times over 100+ frames. Despite these challenges, completing the loop became my favorite part of the project, because, to me, what’s a good short animation if it doesn’t loop? Overall, this project was quite the experience. I may not create another animation this way, but if the opportunity arises, I'd be open to learning more about simple animations I could incorporate into larger design systems. This project taught me a lot about file management and gave me a real appreciation for how complex traditional animation can be, especially when it isn’t preplanned. If I animate again, I would definitely use a different program and plan to make something more polished and fun to loop.