In this tutorial, we made an animation on After Effects. We began by creating or getting an image from the internet. It had to be quite a simple image and I chose this:
http://www.clipartpanda.com/categories/deer-clip-art-vector
I then digitally traced this in Illustrator and gave it my own colours. I didn't like the gradient effect so I stuck to block colour for my design. I did come across a problem in this session, however. The line that was around the deer could not be deleted because of the way it was traced around the shape. I therefore decided not to animate the deer and instead chose to animate leaves falling around the deer. This is what the landscape looked like:
The background is very basic as well as the leaves and I could have made it more impressive. However, it is minimal which is effective and the deer and the leaves definitely stand out as the main elements of the image.
I struggled with After Effects as there was a lot of steps that I struggled to follow. However, we began in Illustrator, which I am comfortable with. Before I realised there would be a problem with separating the sections of the deer because of the black line, I split up the clipart into layers.
I originally planned to animate the antlers, the tail and the ears but later figured out I could. However it was a useful part of the process as I had never sectioned up an image into layers and will probably need to know how to do this in the future. I then converted the image into After Effects:
It was important to select Composition- Restrain Layer Sizes so all the layers would remain the same and this gave me my project opened up in After Effects, with all the different layers.
I was now able to move around my image as well as open the image back in Illustrator and change parts of it and then it would automatically change in After Effects. The duration of the movie would be 10 seconds long and the preset would be HDTV 1080 25:
I was now ready to begin animating the image. I then realised the fault in my image and created leaves to fall past the deer. When looking at each layer by the timeline, you can rotate each layer as well as gradually move them down the page, according to the timeline. This took a lot of perfecting as I found, when I was rotating my layers, that some would rotate too quickly and then have to redo the rotation to fit the length of the sequence. I eventually made them effectively fall over my deer but sometimes they would go behind the deer so I had to set the deer clipart far back so they would all look as if they were falling in front of the deer. The end result was successful, although it took me a while to get here because I struggled to follow the steps.
The tutorial was very informative and I came away with a whole new set of skills when it comes to Illustrator and After Effects. Although the artwork is basic, I think the animation is very effective and this is the most important aspect of the task. I enjoyed the workshop and I am happy with the result.
