Prior to the session we were asked to create a simple portrait image (head and shoulders) drawn or traced in Illustrator. Separate elements of the figure had to be placed on different layers so they would be able to move independently when imported in to After Effects.
Here is my portrait that I drew on Illustrator:
As well as bringing a vector portrait to the session we also had to bring about 5 to 6 textures to the lesson with subtle textures working best I chose textures of paper and fabrics.
The piece of animation that inspired the workshop was Andrew Allen's"The Thomas Beale Cipher", which featured simple vector style portraits and also layered textures and motion loops.
The first thing we did was import our Illustrator work in to After Effects, making sure to select the retain layer sizes so each layer from Illustrator would be imported. We then set up the composition to HD settings: 1920px by 1080 px, and set the frame rate to 25 frames per second.
Once we had done this we then rigged each layer by moving the anchor point to the point at which we wanted the element to animate from. After this we used the parent tool to attach all layer to the appropriate parent layer, which meant that , for example, the hair moves with head when the head is animated.
We then looked at adding motion to the timeline, one layer at a time by using the rotation and position properties, under the transform option and activating the keyframes by clicking the stopwatch icon. As well as this we looked at using a tool called the 'wiggler' found under the Window menu. As the name suggests the tool creates a slight 'wiggle' movement to an element you choose to animate. The number of wiggles per second (frequency) determines the kind of movement you create, as well as the magnitude (size of the wiggle) that you choose. I opted for more subtle movements and applied the wiggler tool to both the rotation and position properties.
We also touched on coding in After Effects, and learnt that an equals sign turns an expression on or off and that expressions always override key frames. To activate expressions you must hold down the alt key and click on the stop watch button. The code we learnt was something that would do the same thing as the wiggler but would be done using text instead of key frames, to do this we deleted the text already there and typed: wiggle (5,50) the values in the brackets indicating the frequency and magnitude. Although this was interesting to learn I prefer just working with key frames.
To finish off we added the textures we had gathered by placing the texture as the background then using track mats which make layered objects become textured objects. We had to make sure the texture was positioned underneath the chosen layer we wanted to texture in the layer stack and scaled it so it was bigger than the layer. Then we selected layer modes and chose 'alpha mat' which essentially 'pushes' the texture though the object.
I added a texture to the background of my video which was a subtle paper texture, I couldn't find the right textures for the character portrait and I liked the colours I had used so didn't want to use a texture that wasn't going to add anything to the animation but I may go back to this work yet and try more textures.
Here is the finished video:
