For the first assignment of the animation module, we have been tasked with creating and selecting some animation exercise we have been doing over the past few weeks. This is meant to show off our best work within Adobe After Effects and Adobe Audition (with audio). I have decided on a few ideas that could be worthy of including in my portfolio, with this exercise being one of them. I basically decided to go for one of the principles of animation, that is staging because I believe it’s one of the easier principles to pull off in a sense that I can pick a location and animate it to the best of my ability.
How it was made
I got started by sketching up a quick storyboard of the animation by hand and wrote down some key notes within my planning. It doesn’t matter if my drawing deters from the actual composition, this is basically a rough sketch-up of what it’s going to look and act like.
Here’s a rundown of what to expect in this animation since some writing on the storyboard is kind of difficult to see – the animation starts off with a desert island and some palm trees, with a mountain present in the background. Some clouds will also appear and disappear using the scale and position tools. Later in the piece, the wind will pick up, as lines indicating direction will follow a set path on the screen. The waves will also be animated as will the trees swaying, some fog will faintly be visible on the mountain in the background, incorporating many things that weren’t covered in the weekly activities, such as CC Bend It, Fractural Noise and Wave Warp effects to enhance my animation. Ideally, I should want it to be around 10 – 20 seconds long, a decent length for one of the portfolio examples.
After that was done, I carefully imagined the animation in my head and wondered how such feats were going to be applicable. Some careful consideration later and I jumped onto After Effects, starting off with a solid cyan background for the sky. I also created two ocean layers to act as placeholders and an eclipse for the island, choosing a beige, sandy color for realism.
My first scene building objective was to make the bark of the palm tree that was going to sway back and forth. I achieved this by drawing a brown rectangle on the screen and applying a Bender effect, ensuring the attributes were in needs of my satisfaction. By placing it behind the island layer, I was able to capture that scene a little bit more.
Next was creating the leaves that would hang on the palm trees. This was possible by drawing a custom shape using the pen tool in the shape that I wanted it, then by rotating it and aligning it with the top of the tree for a desired result. Here is what the layer looks like on its own.
I made some tweaking to the layer, like enlarging it a bit and adjusting the ends to make it appear longer. After that was done, I duplicated the layer and repeated the process seven more times, flipping four in the process to make a cartoony looking palm tree below. I also had to pre-compose the leaves and stem into one layer to keep the viewport organized.
Next was duplicating the palm tree to make five more similarly-looking palm trees to give some character to the island. It should look something like this. I have also animated them to look as they were swaying back and forth from the wind that was picking up within the piece
It’s time to animate these tree’s swaying, as I had difficulty at the start of making this. After learning how it works, I got the movement down, but also had to tweak some of it to make it look authentic and real. I decided the amount of times the tree’s should be leaning to one position should be around 2 seconds or under. So, something like this.
I also added a mountain for scenery, and I will be planning to apply an effect on how the natural structure is perceived in the animation. I drew a large rock using the pen tool and coloured it grey. I also did the same thing to the layer that was going to act as the snow cap on the mountain.
My plan will come into effect here, as this is my first time experimenting with the effects inside After Effects. What I’m trying to achieve here is to create a foggy effect on the summit of the mountain and animate it’s evolution. The way to go about this is to go to Effect > Noise & Grain > Fractual Noise. I applied this to the mask I drew using the pen tool.
I ensured to modify the mask, like tweaking the mask feather and expansion for the fog outline to not be too noticeable on the mask path. Now it was time to turn the opacity down to make it faintly visible to simulate mountain fog.
Looking back on the animation, I could try and make the waves accurate and animated. Thankfully, there is a way to initiate this. I selected on the wave layer and added a Wave Warp effect to make the wave-y look for the water.
I’ve also added a new shape layer for the deep water below the ocean, filling this one a darker shade of blue for authenticity. I’ve also animated the evolution of the deep water layer so that it changes over time.
My next task was to make the clouds that would fill the sky above the scene. The way I went about doing this is creating a new layer using the Pen Tool to create a simple shape. It should look like something this, but with the anchor point in the center rather than at the top.
I created another cloud and lowered the opacity for it to appear faintly. Now it was time for the cloud movement. Positioning them from left the right wouldn’t be enough, so I added another effect called Turbulent Display for the clouds to change appearance and kind of skew in shape. Here are the flayers after the effect is activated.
My intentions for the clouds is for them to be animated by changing shape, gradually moving across the top half of the scene, past the Fractual Noise fog, possibly changing scale too. These are the layers at the start of the animation after some tweaking to them.
By tweaking, I mean by modifying and animating the Complexity in the effects panel for the effect to take center stage.
The next thing to add were the wind lines that would indicate where the wind was coming from. I imagined the wind developing from the right portion of the composition and thus wanted to capitalize on that.
None of this is complete without creating a new shape layer with the Pen Tool, drawing where I wanted the line to go. For this line specifically, I wanted it to travel back in the direction it came from.
I also animated both starts and end points to quickly remove the line from the composition after it’s use. I achieved this by setting my start point much further away from the end point to create a line running through the screen as if it was the wind direction. This is what I want as you can see in this image here.
I went further and repeated the same process with a different shape layer to create a second wind direction, this time moving in the right direction as shown here.
I thought two wind lines weren’t enough, so I made sure to add one more to the composition, this time travelling straight left instead of performing a loop as it did with the second attempt.
Animating the wind is fairly easy, all I had to do left was make the animated segment a little smoother by adding Easy Ease to the keyframes. I also had to position the start keyframes a little further past the end keyframes to get the best result possible.
Here is something I’ve tried to emulate on all of the trees. Whenever the tree bark sways, the distance between each leaf layer stays the same. Having this basic feature would not make the swaying look realistic. To accomplish this, I attempted to make some new trees using the same layers, but I had to do it without pre-composing the trees as tempting it was to keep the layer viewport clean and tidy. For the first two trees, I had done a successful job at adjusting each leaf so that whenever the tree is the end of a point, the leaves would move as if they are flailing around. After some failed attempts, I decided to pre-compose the two trees that I had done and stick them where the original trees were so that nothing will be lost.
This is what the timeline looks upon tweaking the trees. I made sure to align the keyframes of the stem layer to its leaves so that they attach the the tree bark and not become its own floaty layer.
The Audio
Now that the animation was done, it was time to put in the audio that would assist the piece and have some depth to it. I opened up Audition and experimented with the different noise generators. I felt the pink noise was more fitting for the beach waves, so I selected that and tried to manipulate the noise so much that it should look like what was in the image above.
I opened up the waveform and dragged the envelopes at each end for the audio to fade in and out when played. I also had to be mindful of not increasing the volume so much that the lines start clipping, as I wanted the audio track to be of a perfect volume.
I also tried a hand at pitch bending the audio track to see which one would be better to use. I found the ‘Just Winding Up’ option rather suitable for the composition, as you can see here.
Upon tweaking a few things here and there regarding the audio track, I felt satisfied with the beach wave sound. Now it it time to apply this in After Effects. Before that, I went ahead and saved the track and placed it in my audio folder within the module specific folder on my PC.
To give the animated piece more character, I searched for a audio clip of a few seagulls to add in that island-y feel to the composition. Just like the beach waves track, I ensured to place them accurately as not to cause confusion and issues mounting to organizing the tracks as they should be. The image below is the process of slightly lowering the seagulls audio track for them to be heard in the backing noise from the waves.
Overall, this is a not a bad animation piece from my point of view. The only downside is that each tree doesn’t sway at different frames. This is something that I’ve spent so much time trying to perfect the remaining four trees, but to no avail. If I could attempt this kind of piece again, I would maybe focus alot more time to try and fix the issue.
Leave a Reply