Adding dimension with space, motion, and depth

- [Instructor] It's a really important element in any type of design, but even more so in motion graphic design. The space between objects is known as negative space and it has its own shape. It's important that you consider the shape of space in your compositions as much as the shape of the objects themselves. This is a great use of negative space for a company named Egg 'n' Spoon Couriers. The letter E forms the logo. If you look closely at the negative space you may see the extra messaging revealed in the form of an egg on a spoon. The egg and spoon motif implies that the courier takes extra care with fragile items. The first time you look at the logo you see an e, but once you see the egg and spoon, it's hard to see anything else. In motion graphics you also need to consider the space outside the screen. It can be tempting to create all of the animation in the confines of the rectangular screen and here's such an example of what people that are used to doing print design working on pages have problems with this when they move into motion graphic design. They're used to working within the confines of a rectangle. They're not used to thinking outside the screen. Try to get away from the idea of the frame being a constraint used to contain your design elements and see it as a window for the viewer to look through to see all sorts of vital environments. You can create a more open space and a much more engaging animation by animating objects in such a way that they break out of the confines of the screen. Here's a great example that shows the beauty of open spaces. The movement between frames takes the viewers attention on a journey making them completely forget the edges of the screen. (light mysterious music) Movement can also form shapes and lines. Palinopsia is a term used to describe a visual trail. The Greek for Palin means again and Opsia means seeing. So it's seeing again. You can use these visual trails to lead the viewers eye on a flowing, easy and enjoyable path. So keep the movement of your elements in mind as you animate them. The next element we're going to discuss is depth. Depth can add so much more interest to a flat image. Without depth it can be hard to fit everything that you want into a small rectangular screen. But as soon as you add depth, look how much more you can fit onto the screen. So you can use depth to fit more elements onto the screen. You can also use depth as a different direction for the viewer to journey on. Here we see the illusion of depth illustrated with these three words. Notice that the word illusion has less of a distance to travel than the word depth has to travel when we add perspective. By animating these words at different speeds, we can create the illusion of depth. I've also desaturated the words that are in the distance and that also adds to the illusion of depth. When you're working on motion graphic design, you can also use blur to blur things in the distance slightly more and that will give you an added illusion of depth. This phenomena, where things in the foreground move more quickly than things in the background is known as parallax. And you can see parallax in lots of 2D animations.