After Effects - Year One Finale - Collaborative Film

This workshop is a collaborative film project of our group and the final workshop of the year. Each of us created a ten second animation based on the idea of an object/creature that lives in the sky. These objects/characters will animate from right to left across the screen. These individual animations have been composited together to make a longer film piece. The intention of this workshop was to celebrate our work, individual styles, and the techniques covered throughout the year.

Project references:

Lantern Fishes from Adam Gault on Vimeo.

We looked at this animation piece which about fish under the sea, the animation goes from right to left, as soon as one moves off screen, it introduces the next scene, similar to what our group will produce.

Furthermore, I looked for my own project references and came across this bizarre and weird russian animated short cartoon "Fru 89 From left to right". The author is Ivan Maximov, while the music was composed by Polish electronic music artist Marek Bilinski. This is a great project reference and it features several different characters which animate from one side to the other.

I chose a hummingbird for me to work with in this workshop as they are beautiful birds and the movement of the wings would be enjoyable to create in after effects. I chose the bird on the right because it's a unique art style and an abstract style to work with.

I scanned the drawing and placed it into photoshop to prepare it for colouring. I used a gradient effect in each part of the bird to produce the colours.

I create a sky background, and designed to clouds in a similar theme to the bird.

I organised the layout of bird and parent each part to the body so when I move the object, it all moves at once.

Each wing layer was converted to a 3D layer in order to successfully animate the motion of a hummingbird's wings. I set keyframes for two different positions of each wing.

The expression loopOut("pingpong", 2) was used to loop the animation of the bird so it constantly flaps its wings as long as the composition.

Once each part of the bird was animated, I moved the character from right the left and used keyframes to make the bird fly.

Now the bird fully functions with its wings moving and begins to fly from right to left.

To help me animate my bird, I watched a tutorial of how to animate a 2D bird in 3D space. Along with watching hummingbird animations in order for me to understand the motion of the wings for the particular bird.