During the production of my ‘Canary’ film, I tried to use After Effect to create a dynamic effect. I drew the flowers and leaves in Adobe Illustrator I and then imported them into After Effect to create the swaying leaves.
Progress in After Effect
Because I didn’t consider layering in AI, I had to use pins in AE to make the leaves skeletal and wobbly, which was quick and easy to do, but the downside was that you couldn’t look at them closely and there were some rigid movements.
Fortunately, the shot is only a few seconds long and is presented as a background rather than a subject, so the final result is satisfactory.
If you need to create a leaf-swaying animation like this in the future, you should try to avoid too many layers in the drawing process, as this will greatly reduce the speed of your computer and will affect your final film.
Regarding this involvement in the animation of the LIAF short film, my main task was to convert the 2D drawing into a 3D effect and give smooth camera movement, and participate in the animation of some bubbles.
The biggest problem I have faced would be how to make the two-dimensional image look three-dimensional and allow the camera to enter the scene.
At this stage I tried three ways to deal with this problem:
After Effect
Monocular Depth Estimation
Blender
The first method that came to mind was to use AE to map a flat surface into a cube, but this did not produce the desired effect and the camera was only able to make some simple movements, which was not the ideal effect we wanted.
Creating a cube in AE can only move a tiny angle in camera
The second way is to calculate the depth of the image and then imported it into blender, I used blender to create a depth-of-field effect into the image. The results of this image also waste most of the surrounding background and only allow for small movements.
Finally, I find the solution which is to import the illustration as a solid plane into Blender, and then I used the knife tool to go around with the rock shape and manually create a 3d feel for the image in the form of sheets. That works pretty well.
It is a really great opportunity to work with second-year students, I was assigned to help Penny with the design of a female character. There are only two shots (a back and a close-up of the front) of the entire character appearing.
Two shots from Penny’ storyboard
Penny showed me the storyboard she had drawn and explained to me the role and personality of the character throughout the animation, as well as some of the Moodboards she had found. I quickly got an idea of what the character needed to look like as Penny was very thorough with the information she gave me. I spent the day drawing the general outline and facial expressions of the character, and as the character was set in the year 1948, I also drew two hairstyles for her to choose from.
Character design for Cat lady
The only thing Penny pointed out to me was that she wanted the character’s eyes to have a more cat-like outline so that they would relate better to the story. So I changed the eyes and set the overall tone and then started to animate the character.
Add cat-like eyes
Penny gave me an animation reference video which made it very easy for me to understand the mood Penny wanted. I sent Penny a few keyframes of my drawing, and Penny was very positive about the rough drawing and wanted me to continue to refine it.
I think this cooperation was a success except for the fact that I ended up using more time for keyframe drawing because the class and the homework took up most of my time, but I didn’t have time to refine it, and my quick grasp of the character’s dynamics was still lacking, I think this needs a lot of drawing practice in the future to further improve my drawing speed.
For this project, I worked on the character design and a small part of the rough animation. I think this experience has helped me to understand other people’s ideas quickly in the workplace and I have learnt that communication is a very important and crucial step, as it can save a lot of time in a project.
I think the challenge I had from this experience was the keyframing, which required me to add some personal emotion to the character and how the character should be represented in just a few seconds, Steve had said in class that even a simple push on the door should have an animated character’s own way of expression. I thought that by refining the character’s eyes, a backward glance would be more effective in adding a sense of mystery to the woman, which it does. I found that if I added more vivid character expressions to the character, it would bring tension to the animation and convey the character’s personality better.
