Character Animation

We have looked at using After Effects for many differently types of animations and effects, but today we are going to explore how to use After Effects for traditional character animation.

Before we can jump into character animation, we must explore a few of the principles of animation that drive how characters need to move in order to spring to life. Believe it or not, but the art of character animation has been undergoing development since it's inception in the late 1800's. The progress of this craft, mostly spearheaded by the master animators in the 20's and 30', has been heralded by the development of 12 principles of animation. We are going to take a look at 3 of the 12 principles and examine how we can apply them to our work in After Effects.

Once was have a strong understanding of how the principles of animation demand our characters to move, we can begin working with an exciting new tool in After Effects that will aide in character animation; The Puppet Tool.

Project Due: Week 10

Pull, squash, stretch, and otherwise deform objects on screen using the Puppet Tools. Whether you are creating realistic animations, fantastic scenarios, or modern art, the Puppet Tools expand your creative freedom.

For this project, you will be animating a cartoon character walking across the screen and slipping on a banana. This project focus solely on mastering the Puppet Tools in After Effects. Please follow the directions in Chapter 8 of the Adobe After Effects Classroom in a Book for specific instructions on completing this project. Please ensure your project includes the following required elements before you complete this assignment:

After you have saved the project file on your personal external storage device (like a thumb drive), please upload your After Effects Project File (.aep) and your rendered Quicktime Movie (.mov) to the Banana Man dropbox on D2L.

Before you upload your files to D2L, please ensure your files meet the following naming conventions:

Project Due: Week 10

Animation Characters in After Effects requires a strong foundation of animation principles and practices. To help establish our foundation, we are going to animate a rubber ball bouncing across the screen. Through this exercise, we will learn the principles of squash and stretch, timing and arcs. Here are the specific elements that I am looking for:

After you have saved the project file on your personal external storage device (like a thumb drive), please upload your After Effects Project File (.aep) and your rendered Quicktime Movie (.mov) to the Bouncing Ball dropbox on D2L.

Before you upload your files to D2L, please ensure your files meet the following naming conventions:

Check out these awesome learning resources! I've collected a number of assets that I think will help you conquer this week's homework and laboratory assignment. Please download the following materials to your local hard disk or flash storage device (AKA thumb drive).