Development Blog 1: Animation

So I've decided to share my learning experience on this blog as a way of remembering what I've learnt so far, and my aims and intentions with each project.

The first thing I'm tackling is an animation project for a friend of mine in the hopes of creating some more content for his sketch comedy group. As they are a biscuit themed group, of all things, I have decided to make the characters vector representations of various biscuits. Starting with a simple two man sketch that's about 10 seconds long, it'll teach me to animate using Duik Bassel plugin for Adobe After Effects, as well as basic lip syncing, and also give me a rough idea of how long these things should take.

Day 1 of the first proper work on it, I have created my first character model, a Bourbon biscuit.

As I plan on making more of these, I have decided to create a base layer character, and then will create clothing to match the scene that they are going to be placed in. As a result, I have created a vector of the character and drawn my own mouth chart for lip syncing.

A while into the process, I decided to switch from my original plan of using the puppet tool inside After Effects, as it creates too much bend and stretch for what I want to do. What I've instead decided to do is source a plugin which creates rigid points of movements on characters, and can also assign different sliders to specific keyframes, allowing for easy lip syncing.

The designing part of the process was the most time consuming at the start, but luckily, biscuits are fairly geometric, and so I've been able to create something that I'm quite happy with.

I did, however, forget to put each different part on a new layer, and so have had to go back into Illustrator and clean that up, which later transpired to be an unnecessary process as well, but hey, it means that my eyes and grouped objects are on one layer instead of several different ones. I'm still working on odds and end but intend to get this guy into After Effects as one solid composition.

My next job will be to test animation and make sure this is the correct way of doing it before moving onto the next character.