This was the first of out AfterEffects workshops and was based around loops and living holds. We started with a head and shoulder portrait, I chose to use a portrait of Dave Grohl from The Foo Fighters. I chose him because I am quite a fan of his music, and is somewhat different to what I've done before.To prepare for the lesson we had to vectorise the portrait. Overall I really liked the outcome of the portrait but I feel like I should have completed it more, in such as finishing the arms, and separated the layers out with the beard/goatee and the eyes.
The next step was to get it into AfterEffects. Once it was ready in AfterEffects, we began to animate some of the individual layers. The crucial thing was to set up the loops, ensuring that the start and end keyframes were in the same positions, this was before we started to actually animate the elements. Using the pan behind tool we moved the anchor points to make sure that the centres of rotations were in a more realistic position such as the joints where the arms meet the shoulders, or the head meets the neck.
Then we had to link up some of the layers together, to ensure that they moved together, this is called the parent and child link and this was used for the layers that make up the face, like the eyes, nose and head. Once all the links were made, we went back and did some more animation to make sure that it worked together.
We were then introduced to another animation technique, which used 'wiggles'. This is a semi-automated process where you can select the frequency and magnitude of random wiggles along a motion path. The frequency dictates the number of jumps per second and the magnitude dictates the size of the jumps.
There is also a coding type of animation which is based on JavaScripts, we coded a wiggle into the animaton, which was really easy to do.
The final step was to add the textures and effects. I imported a folder of textures that I had picked to suit the style of the animation from a folder of textures I have on my hard drive.
Then we followed the export process we did for the previous AfterEffects projects.
This is my final animation.
