Animation - Character Rigging and Shower Guy!

Boy this winter has been long long looonggg. What have you been doing to keep busy? I’ve been working on learning and developing my motion design skills, and my biggest project so far was a water conservation animated YouTube ad, you can see a tiny clip of it in my Artist Blog 3 video, at time mark 8:44 sec.

How do you approach learning new skills? One of my favourite ways to learn a new skill is through a combination of Skillshare and Youtube. I tend to take a Skillshare class as my first base and then use YouTube to complement or troubleshoot since the response time on Skillshare isn’t very quick.

Here are some quick recommendations below:

Step 1: Into to After Effects and what you can use it for

Daniel Scott is a delightful, humorous, refreshing teacher and I thoroughly enjoyed his classes. Most teachers I’ve found are pretty good overall on Skillshare, but he’s two notches higher.

Skillshare Character Animation course by Fraser Davidson

Character Animation Creating Authentic Facial Expressions in Adobe After Effects

Professional Character Rigging & Design,

I used just a few parts of this course when I was trying to figure out how to change the face when moving the head side to side.

General Skillshare for After Effects

My big After Effects playlist on YouTube:

Character Rigging w/ Joysticks n Sliders

Bonus

How to create a cartoon water effect

Good quick tutorial if you ever attempt to move your file and everything breaks:

(The answer is go to “collect files” under dependencies first. Then, if you’re like me and compress files to move them, make sure you move them out of that compressed folder before you open them again, else everything will always seem broken.)

Bonus

New Year, New Earth - Motion Design

Anecdote below, if you want to skip, jump to “Making this animated gif”.

When we hopefully Covid gets under control this year, I hope when we rebuild that we consider if we really do want to go back to same-old same-old. Maybe we can find a way to let the earth recover from our over-consumption and dirty industry.

I don’t want to get too into politics in this post, so I’ll just say this: I’ve needed to commute to work an hour each way every day for the past five years. (My workplace does not view telework favourably, despite saying one of their top values are climate action.) I drive through a city/municipality that doesn’t belong to me every day, one that’s policy seems to be cut down all available forest and replace it with ugly commerce/industry. I’ve watched forest after forest disappear. I’ve watched a beautiful mature one be replaced with an RV sales lot. Think about that for a moment. Nearby is land that had no forest, a patch of concrete, sitting empty for years.

The animals there are taking more risks now, because they have no choice. We see them in dangerous places we didn’t see them before. We say super natural British Columbia, but how are we actually protecting biodiversity here?

I don’t know how to have a voice when the system seems intent on making it impossible, but I’ll keep trying. One success we had this year was that our government included continuing carbon pricing in their future plans, but that doesn’t nearly cover the scope of the issues the earth’s ecosystems are facing. /End of mini rant.

Start here: Making this animated gif:

When I was randomly skimming Skillshare under After Effects a course tagging Procreate and After Effects came up. Why would you use After Effects with Procreate when procreate has Animation Assist I asked myself? For those familiar, you can do frame-by-frame animation in Procreate and it’s pretty good and handy.

Reasons why you might use After effects:

• you want to loop animations without drawing them (see the steam above)

• you want to animate textures on the entire image more quickly (see the concrete 20% opacity texture across the entire video above)

• As mentioned before, you want to do camera tricks, more easily handle fonts, etc (not shown here).

Can you think of more? Comment below. I’m new to this community and would love to learn as much as I can.

Looking to take the course I mentioned above? Here’s a link. (I’m not sponsored.)

Jess

Learning new things : Motion design in After Effects & advice on how to start

This winter I decided to take on something new by learning After Effects to dive more into Motion Design.

Those who have followed me for a while will know that I’ve done little animations before using Procreate to give some fun to what are otherwise static art pieces. (See my Magical Sunriver Map and Sassy cat examples.)

But After effects is a leap away from frame by frame animation which is very very very time consuming, and allows you to do certain things easier like camera panning. For example, when trying to show you different aspects of my magical map I needed to film my iPad and move it manually to different parts of my illustration. It was clumsy and I didn’t feel it was executed as well as it could be. So in after effects, you can achieve camera movements much more precisely. You can also capture different styles like flat vector animations easily and longer animations.

Inspiration + How am I learning?

To start I dove into Skillshare and Youtube (not sponsored, but you can see my playlist of interesting AE videos on my YT channel). One artist I was lead to which I absolutely love is SlimJim. Seeing his work inspires me to want to do some of my own, especially as some meshes with themes I like, such as travel, but putting my own interests of nature and biodiversity themes in there too. See my fave work from him below:

Is After Effects easy? No. Is it intuitive? Hell no. But not much worse than Illustrator. Once you grasp the concept of a simplified illustrator times the variable of time, it all starts to make sense.

I think this type of learning will especially appeal to feel like they are both right brain and left brain people. They love art but also like math and/or coding. Because there’s optional math and coding aspects to AE that will help you achieve the artistic vision you’re going after. (More on that another time.)

A simpler motion design - my first plant

Here is a little plant I made as a way of breaking down a much larger project into very small bite sized pieces. To do it I made the plant itself in Illustrator, made sure break each part that would move into different layers (each leaf w/ stem on a different layer) (ALWAYS NAMING MY LAYERS) and then importing it with layers intact into After Effects.

Then in After Effects I assigned a “Bend” effect to each leaf layer over time, telling each leaf which direction to bend in and for how long. For this animation I wanted each leaf to be a little unique from each other so they don’t all bend perfectly the same, making it a little more interesting.

I know, it’s spectacular. But I wanted to share with you my learning process so that it might inspire you to learn to. Artists don’t need to stick to one medium.

If you want to start in AE and already have a good base in Illustrator, I recommend a day or more of basic course exercises (my first was on skillshare) and then you can add random videos to support your learning.

For the above bend video, I used this class on YT:

Happy new year! May you have a very creative 2021.

Cheers,

Jess