Speed and Motion - Character

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Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and Affect Effects


For our 3rd workshop with After Effects, we explored animation properties using geometric shapes of our designed characters which were created in illustrator. Our character design needed to be 1920 x 1080 in RGB colour. Different assets were on separate layers, we used simple geometry, shapes and vectors. Properties that we covered in this workshop include: scale, position, set up, shape rigging, parenting,  timeline and keyframes.  With our characters, scenes and sets in our own style, we produce a 10 second animation piece.

We looked at 'Catch me if you can title Sequence - 2002, Kuntzel and Deygas' in class as it is a great example of pre-composing. Along with 'The Complete Animade Lernz, by Animade' as another example.
http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/catch-me-if-you-can/

I looked for more project references to help me with my ideas.
For this I created a cartoon version of a panda, using cel-shaded techniques. Cel-shading is a type of non-photorealistic rendering where 3-D computer graphics appear to be flat. This is done by using less shading colour instead of a shade gradient or tints and shades. Cel shading is a style of computer rendering that mimics the look of hand-drawn artwork and animation. The art style is like a mixture of comic like graphics, exaggeration and photo realism all in different aspects of the graphics. Cel shading is a progressively popular art style; it was originally used in animation before it was recreated to be a digital graphic game style. The lighting and texturing technique results in the game having a cartoon-like appearance.
  

Here in Illustrator, different parts of the bamboo and the panda character have been detached in preparation for animation. The right screenshot shows the pieces attached. 


This is the background for my panda character which was created in Photoshop, the foreground and the bamboo are on different layers. 


I then merged everything to together in illustrator to get the idea of how it looks altogether.


Once I was happy with my character, background and props, I then imported my file into After Effects, to ensure each layer were kept, I had to import it as 'Composition- Retain layer size'


I then created a new composition with the appropriate size and frame rate. 


I dragged my illustrator file onto the new composition, as you can see each layer has been named to help me locate a specific file. 


Here I learnt about the 'Parenting' feature in After Effects. Parenting is used to link one or more layers to a single parent layer. Moving, scaling or rotating the parent layer will then automatically affect all of its children. In my case, the bamboo leaves have been attached to the bamboo stick, so if I move the stick, the leaves will follow. In the right screenshot you can see that I have moved each main element and their single pieces have been attached to move as a whole.



I began to animate the bamboo leaves by using the rotate feature on the leaf layer. I clicked on the little clock on the left of the rotation to set a keyframe, I moved across the timeline at a certain time, then rotated the object again which automatically set a new keyframe and repeated this a few times throughout the 10 seconds. 


I started to animate small features on the panda, such as the legs, arms and ears, I gave the panda subtle movements. I also animated the wooden raft which the panda is sat on so that it looks like it's slowly moving across the water. 


I then duplicated the panda and scaled it so that it reflects each other. 


Next, I animated the foreground and the water to add more subtle movements. 


I added extra leaves to the background and gave them similar movements to the bamboo stick I animated earlier. 


This is a screenshot of the animation.


I added my composition to the render queue and rendered it as a quicktime Apple Pro Res 4444 then uploaded my animation to Vimeo. My final animation is shown below.