As I have been working on these animations, testing various options and parameters, which is still an ongoing process, I realized how difficult it is to give the movement I want without any distortions. It's like making a map: there are classes of maps but each of them contains a certain distortion that comes from bringing a three dimensional space onto a paper. There is a whole set of rules which form and technique of making maps is appropriate for which scale and scope of the map to minimize the distortion and make is comprehensible to the reader.I feel as if the same happens here, with my animations. Because I work with a screen-based (flat) depiction of a three dimensional space, and on top of that I deal with two sets of motion: human movement through the space, and the movement of the space itself..
The way I was applying the structural shifts to my animations before, was to keyframe the shift in position every one or two seconds for all the layers in the relevant 1 or 2 seconds.
I then came with a new method where I apply the shift to every new frame where is begins, so rather than moving from an already established point towards a keyframe that's shifted (in the future so to say), it shifts at the spot, moving instead to an already established point later in the animation. This gives a more smooth motion of all the layers together, and so works better visually, but also results in a much faster shift of the elements, and so only really works in reduced frame rate; the motion applied of 1 pixel per frame using the previous method was comparable to 1pixel per 5 frames with this technique. Another problem here is that, because the layers are only shifted at the present point, and move towards a pre-set final point (unlike previous way where the keyframes WERE placed at a future point in timeline), the closed they get to that final point the more obviously they steer towards it, even if the shift has moved them beyond that...
