Making my character move, using After Effects!
This semester, I'm taking a class called Motion for Illustration, where we're learning how to use Adobe After Effects, as well as how to animate illustrations/prepping illustrations for animation. I've never really done much with animation so this class sounded like a fun challenge and a useful skill to add to my resume. For our first assignment, we had to pitch an idea for an illustration, create it, make it move and then finally render it for the a class screening. I wanted to make this post to show my process and final result!
First, I had to create my pitch, which included a short about me section my inspiration and what I wanted to do for the actual animating part. I'll show the ideation part for my project here:
I had a drawing that was unfinished for a while and thought maybe some motion would make the story more clear! I included some thumbnails (quick doodles that show the concept), as well as a break down on what parts would be moving. This wasn't required, but I also showed some ideas for color palettes, as I hadn't colored the illustration yet :>
After I got approval for my idea, I colored my drawing in Procreate and exported it out to Photoshop. In Photoshop, I did the final rendering and more importantly, separated the parts I wanted to move into individual layers. This was the most time consuming part, as you have to think about what parts that will be exposed while the illustration is moving and specifically what parts needed to be separated so it moves fluidly.
After finishing that up, I saved the file and imported it into After Effects. Since I had already planned out what parts I wanted to move, I used the puppet tool mostly to move the joints back and forth. Besides that, I also added some falling particle effects to add sparkles and moved the hand crank on the music box, making it a 3D object within After Effects and following a tutorial that my professor linked for me to make it move seamlessly. I'll share the link here:
I also wanted to add music to my animation which turned out to be a lot more complicated than I thought it would be. I found an audio clip that was the right length for my animation, using a website called Freesound.org, linked by my college's website. I imported it into After Effects as an .mp3, as an .mp4 will not give you any sound. Then, as I was rendering it out, each time there would be no sound. I ended up using Premiere Pro to add the music in and it was all good to go!
Here's the final result!
