From the course: 5-Day Mograph Challenge: Animating the Elements

Before you get started

From the course: 5-Day Mograph Challenge: Animating the Elements

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Before you get started

- For each Mograph Challenge, you can use whatever software you want to create your animation, whether that be Flash, After Effects, Blender, Cinema 4D, or any others. You should already be familiar with basic animation principles, so if you need to polish up on these, check out Lynda.com's animation course list to refresh your skills. The specific goal of each five day challenge is to create a short animation that you'll then convert to a gif. The standard method of this conversion is through Photoshop, also a popular topic on Lynda.com. So why gifs you may ask? Well for one, it's a hugely popular file format for sharing animation on the web. It also adds to the constraints that will make the challenges even more interesting, and in some ways more exciting. Since we're working in the gif format, you'll not only be limited by the day's theme, but also by the animation length and the file size. Most gif hosting sites have an animated gif file size limit. Tumblr.com, for example, has a file size limit of two megabytes. To keep file sizes in check, you'll need to keep the animation relatively short, about three to seven seconds, and may even need to have a unified color palette. You shouldn't be discouraged by these limitations, not only do they allow you to narrow your creative focus, but the constraints on file size, color palette, animation length, will also require you to flex your creative problem solving skills. So let's get started.

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