Introduction to Animation 2 - Combining Animations

Today I had my second animation workshop in the studio, this time with Gabrielle. She gave us each a brief to work in groups of 3 and create a looped animation based on one of the movie extracts she'd prepared. She showed us a few examples of moving google logos and said that we should aim to create a group of moving characters.

Me, Rema and Samantha chose the Zoo script and decided to each draw an animal which is brown/orange/white in colour to ensure that the animals were harmonious in colour. I animated a tiger, Rema made a porcupine and Samantha an anteater. We worked individually on Adobe Photoshop to create 3 separate animated images.

I began by drawing out my sleeping tiger using a thin brush with 50% opacity.

I then added a background layer of colour to the tiger.

For an added effect, I added a butterfly, which flutters down and lands on the tiger's back.

The animation ended up being a bit more complex than I had planned. The body of the tiger remains still, but a few seconds in to the animation I switched to a still frame of the tiger without eyes or a tail, to allow me to animate these. Keeping my colour opacity at 100% I was then able to add a colour layer behind the tail to make it seem as if it moves over the body.

The next stage was to import all of the animals onto one computer and combine them in Adobe After Effects. My tiger formed the background as I had drawn it on a white layer, whereas the others had animated on a layer separate to the background. We then imported the animals as quicktime movies and placed them around the tiger.

We could not figure out how to loop the playback, so we instead copied and pasted the animals multiple times to make their movement repeat.

Our final composition had all the animals in various sizes surrounding the tiger. For this animation, I removed the butterfly for fear that it would not fit the size of the frame.

Here is our final animation. We were all very pleased with how the animals all move at different speeds, we all felt that they complement each other well.