Well… I had to quit my day job so I could devote full time to the company. I opted to commit my energy here because I’d rather have professional relationships with customers than clients. Volume 2 took four months of solid work. There was a lot of R&D and just a ton of effort put into making sure the files were bug-free and consistently built.

How do you mean, consistently built?

If you should happen to open the Template in Motion it’s set up in a way that makes sense. That’s the result of a bunch of little things, but they add up. There’s a simple folder structure with good naming conventions. The playhead is always parked on the first frame. All the Drop Zones are in the same group in each file. All the keyframes are on the same layer…

Were there any Templates in this pack that gave you a lot of trouble?

Well, it’s funny, the slow ones are the hardest for me – like the Black Hole template. You might assume that because it’s slow it should be simple, but that sort of animation takes more finesse.

In Drop Zones Vol 1 the Templates use behaviors for most of the animation. Why go with keyframes this time around?

I think behaviors are cool, but sometimes to move and twist something you end up needing 5 or 7 behaviors. At that point I don’t think you’re saving anyone any time or doing the project any justice by opting for behaviors instead of keyframing. Also, I was doing a lot of twisting animation with 2D planes. In fast animation, when you get too close to rotating a 2D plane on it’s edge it really breaks the illusion of movement for me. So having that keyframe level precision allowed me to tweak those rotation parameters until I was totally happy.

How did you program the Drop Zones to accept taller media without cropping?

Oh, there was no programming. I did it all with Motion tools. It’s a little hard to explain. But the gist of it is, you make a really skinny Drop Zone and set it to “fit”. That tricks Motion into using the height as the edge that it scales to, instead of the width. Then you negate the cropping parameter so you get to see the full width of whatever media you drop in there.