After effects: Hand drawn image sequences
before even opeinging after effects we had to make sure our drawings that we prepared before hand were edited and in correct condition for the after effects project. above are my origina drawings. i did these drawings obove using pencil and going over in pen, the typography was done using some printing letter blocks i have recently got. i decided i wanted my animation to have a theme, one that would be useful to me. normally i would draw anything and the animation would be meaningless but i wanted it to be good so i chose the theme of the next project i am doing. it also gave me inspiration to do a animation as part of my final project piece fr the YCN competition.
so we had to make sure the backgrounds were white and the black lines were black using the level and i removed the parts that were printed ink that i didnt want, i also had to make sure each variety of image was simelar in size and positioning across all 3 images. having 3 of each image means that the amination dosn;t lok flickering but loks like motion, so always stick to od numbers of drawings, heres an example of one of mine...
So after we prepared all our material we started in after effects, we were told that in animation its best to import audio first and cut to what you want. Then we imported the images, to make things easier than adding images frame by frame we took the set of same images and imported them as 1 clicking the PNG SEquence button this groups them and puts them into a looping sequence. doing this for each of the 4 different images i had was very quick.
the problem was that when we clicked ok, the images were animated realy fast and for only 1 loop so it looked like they flashed and went off, to recitfy this we clicked on file> interpret footage> main…
we Changed the frame rate to 25 frames per second and Changed the loop time from 1 to 15, after this i had to drag the bar that reporesents this along the timeline.
although the aimation now loops more times it is till very fast in the way it moves and slowing it down would make it more gentle to look at. usualy animations have 1 frame persecond but to reduce the production time we work on 2's which is having a drawing every two frames. its not actually slowing down the animation but instead makes it so that there are 12 frames per second and not 24. animation can be done in 3's and 4's but this gets more gittery, working on 2's is the best option. we changed the speed to 200% rather than 100%, to do this we clicekd on the small paragraph which is the timeline options> columns> stretch.
i then started to add colours into the background of the animations, to make the backgrounds transparent we used the modes to change the image layers to multiply. its better to aedit colours in the after effects point of production as it makes it easier and can be chaged for branding and identity matching. you can change the visuals just like photoshop using colour modes.
the next effect we were shown was how to make the line apear like its being written, the first thing we did was mask over the image using pen tool, however we couldn't let the lines meet and we were to make sure they all show even when movong onto the next line. then to make the effect happen we clicked effect> generate> stroke
the stroke effect layers then appear under the image layer you selected if you click stroke sequentially it will make the strokes appear in the order you masked them or un tick it for all of them to come on together, which is what i did.
To achive the effect we went to the panel at the top and change the colour and line width so it covers original image. Then to get the line to appear in motion we put the play head to the beginning, clicked the start stopwatch and changed the end to 0%.
then drag the play head to where you want the image to stop, click the end timer and put it to 100%
then change bottom drop down to the bottom option.
initially i had some trouble understand this but once ut was explained individualy it made sence it was a lot like using the opacity tools.
drawing digitally using illustrator and after effects
to do this we made a drawing in illustrator, this is the vector effect where we can copy and paste straight into after effects without importing, however this effect is only recently being developed so their are flaws. it helps with pixelation as it dosent let the bitmap effect happen. the method is more of a quick fix idea rather than an established way to work.
the problem i had was tha i had create d a3D pig troff and even just using lines, this was too complecated for the shape layer in after effects to pick up to the mask was shwing but the lines were not. this is where the flaws come in the shape has to be very simple for the progrram to be able to pick it up.
you use the selection tool to highlight object and copy in after effects you create a shape layer by simply using the pen tool while nothing s selected and alyer will apear, this is when you paste your object, because i had problems with the icking up of my object i imported the file as a normal image file. another way i could rectify this was to make all the seperate shapes in after effect on seperate laers and this would not have been beneficial and would be time consuming.
here is my final animation...
i am really happy with my animation, as a first test attept it worked out well. i think the fact that i had an idea and a thought of what i wnatwd my animation to look like in the first place really heped, i made my material relevant and it all irst toegther. the background work really well because of the country feel to the orchard pig brand of craft cider. although i think its good there are some things i would change i think the clip needs audio and i also think for the brand itself there could be more of a story. safter we had gone through some of the processes and techniwques i made some changes, lie overlapping images, ching the background and adding fade in's. when doing the mask for the stroke of the outline of the pig, it meant that the inside of this line was filled in with the bakground making the orchard pig text invisible. so i went onto photoshop and took just the text importing it and adding it onto this animation. i think the animation works realy well, utalises all the techniwques without it being too much and also is apropriate to the orchard pig brand.
