Animating Puppet in After Effect

The second assignment we got in digital compositing class was to animate a character with After Effect.
It was kind of like moving a puppet in it.
The character should be in silhouette only,
so it would look kind of like a shadow puppet.

This is the scene and character I designed



and a snap shot from the video



The hat on the girl’s head supposed to be a fish with lion’s head
(OMG that sounds like the Singapore Mer-Lion in Chinese style XDD)
To make this figure move,
I first drew every body part and the lanterns on separate layers in Illustrator.


Then imported all the layers into After Effect,
set up key frames, and adjusted each part separately.

Mondrian’s Work Animated

The first day in digital compositing class,
we learned how to move shapes alone with a soundtrack.
With Piet Mondrian’s paintings as references,
we played with the lines and rectangular shapes around.
I chose this one to animated:

We didn't spent much time on that so the video was pretty short.
(not even to the main part haha)


It was quite fun.
(I love the music!)
The music is "Sing Sing Sing" by Benny Goodman & Gene Krupa

6-legged Walk Cycle

*~*~MERRY CHRISTMAS~*~*

Such a good time to active my blog XD ha ha

It's winter vacation for me finally ~(*w*~)(~*w*)~

so now I have time to upload the works I've done in fall semester.

My Animation teacher gave the class an interesting start by making our first assignment a 6-legged walk cycle. As long as the thing has 6 legs and is walking, it doesn't have to be a living creature. (I loved somebody's idea of walking long sofa XD)

I wanted to create a shadowy monster that wares a paper mask as face, and there will be a Chinese character on its forehead.

I sketched out some ideas

(獅 is the Chinese character for LION;

狗 & 犬 are two ways of writing DOG)

and in the end I chose to do the giant dog.

Well, although it ended up doesn't take a dog form when I make it into animation ...

In this pencil test, the monster actually walked pretty funky because I made a mistake XD
I shouldn't have make all six legs the same pace since the back legs made smaller steps than the forelegs. The fact that those back legs would not be able to catch up with the front really bothered me.
So I fixed that when I made it into color version with background.
(made the back legs walked 2 times faster~)




I actually made it my assignment for digital compositing class when the teacher asked us to make a character hook up with a moving background XD