Last year basically was an intro to animation. From here on out, I will try to be more practical/realistic.

This year (so far) I have been working on animating letters and words.

This was my first attempt at animating a word:

It isn't very good and I deemed it as a fail. Not only because the A, R, and M have weird transitions (the A and M flip upside-down and the r is... not quite right) but because the first "O" is not bolded (and none of them were supposed to be bolded at all??) and the position was off.

As for the word itself, I chose it because I was originally going to make something showing problems with schools and classrooms (and how the MacLab "throws out" the idea of tradition education)

I soon realized I should do individual letters (I think the bold is from a collective anchor point and double layers) and started off with an A-a transition (I can reverse the sub-comps in master comps, so I can have both upper to lower, and lower to upper)

The first obvious thing wrong with this is that there is no hole in either the capital or lowercase letter. This is because I have not worked on the negative space path, and it folds on itself, which is what I am trying to avoid by making individual letter animations.

The second thing you notice is that it is super slow. I will definitely speed this up, as it is not very attention-retaining, but I wanted a slow version so I had more space to mess around with keyframes and so I could speed it up as I need

There seem to be some keyframes I missed in changing the path, and I will change that.

Easy fix: deleted unnecessary keyframes.

I fine tuned the negative space to not fold in on itself. Here it is:

I need to make the transition more smooth (I think I could just use the graph editor)