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Self Taught After Effects - Christmas Animation (Inspired by Workshop 2 & 3 with Sara)


After my third workshop with Sara and learning how to work with the rotating and position technique, I decided to have a go myself. In my last workshop I created a clock where the handles moved and several smaller clocks appeared however I wanted to try and create a cartoon that would move as I felt this would be more of a challenge. I also wanted to see if the same techniques applied when working with characters. Below shows my animation:

CHRISTMAS ANIMATION from Amy Winson on Vimeo.


MY BRIEF:
- To illustrate my own background with snow falling
- To do it for a company (In this case I choose the company I work for and decided that their products would fall from a sleigh passing over the background)
- To have some sort of figure to the front of the image

 I have set myself a really complex and challenging brief to push myself to my limits.

ILLUSTRATIONS

I started off by illustrating a background with snow falling. Originally when I did this, I hadn't realised the use of the rotating and position in Adobe After Effects therefor did all this manually by slowly moving parts of the image and saving. I found the background a challenge in some points as I wanted to keep it 2D however get a sense of 3D within this.
The reindeer I found challenging at some points especially when it came to his mouth.

AFTER EFFECTS

I faced quite a few problems when working with After Effects which started to frustrate me. Firstly when trying to import the reindeer, he wasn't showing up and instead a black screen was appearing. I realised the opacity was turned right down and this is something that the programme might default too. I also found that when importing the reindeer and trying to keep the layers, for some reason the layers was disappearing, this meant I had no layers to work with. I closed the programmed and shut this down a few times which then the glitch had went.
It was challenging in parts as when the reindeer was moving and jumping his hand would come away from his body and it wouldn't be attached to anything, I pulled his arms in and made them longer to stop this from happening.
I also had problems as when the presents fell from the sleigh they was popping out of nowhere and looking really odd. I decided to make them smaller to fit behind the sleigh and also have them to only show at a certain time in the timeline.
Apart from this, when I got every different layer to work, I found that it worked really well and smoothly. I am really happy with the outcome as this is my first time working with a lot of layers at once and I didn't think I would have succeeded so well.

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