How Plumtrr's Escape Came Together

It's Story Time:

And today we're going to see how much can go into a single story

(The original story is actually quite complex: involving arranged marriages
and daring escapes, but this is the summary version)

What is a story without a good character? Not much, I'd say. Meet Plumtrr: an avian alien on the run. He's a character I made a year ago, (And one of many, at that), and he will be the star of the short animation I'm exited to share with you today! Shortly, we will be able to see him make his escape! The Idea for this was to create a short, multi-scene animation with a basic plot, and I feel I navigated those parameters easily.

Now, The story may be the meat of any animation short, but there is a lot that goes into setting up that  storyline meat and cooking it in a presentation-ready fashion. For this story, I dived into AfterEffects once again. Now, I am steadily getting more and more comfortable with the tools provided to me in after effects, and adjusting to the timing of walk cycles and similar things, so this was destined to be a huge step up from my last animation posted here.

I started where I perform best: on standard paper. I used up many sheets to get all the necessary bits and pieces for my animation (Line wise) in order. To the right, we se only one of the total 3-4 sheets I used in this stage of the development.

I had to be careful, while drawing, to leave anything I wanted to move separate from it's related parts. On the picture to the right, you can see how disjointed everything looks: the Bridge is apart from the ship, and Plumtrr's limbs are all over the place. There were even parts I didm' end up using later, but it's better to be safe than sorry, I'd think.

The next step was to scan the images in and drop them into Photoshop for some color.

In Photoshop, I used multiply layers to give color (And some texture) to the various aspects of each scanned image. I didn't do much shading, for a lack of time, but that would be something I would do in the future. And perhaps I'd have to make several copies of shaded images for different light sources. But for now, I didn't focus on that so much.

After each part was colored and separated out in Photoshop (With the use of the quick select and magic wand), they were ready to be plopped right into AfterEffects to be set up.

In AfterEffects, I began by setting the central point for each layer and putting the isolated pieces together like they should be. I parented most layers: The head to the body, the eyes to the head, and so on. The before and after images can be seen below:

Maybe We CAN put Humpty back together again. We just need AfterEffects! 

Look how cute and pixel-y he can be!

Now that we had all the pictures and images together and colored, it was time to put them into action. How did I do that? With compositions! Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the concept of compositions, think of them like those little Russian nesting dolls. If you make an image, like Plumtrr here, into a composition on it's own and make him walk, you can place that walking character composition as a layer in any other composition you want! You can even resize it as you please.

The two pictures to the right are images of the same composition in two different settings, set to two different sizes. If I edited the composition to dance, then in every scene containing that composition, he would dance rather than walk. (Which would be funny, but not quite what I was going for).

Using compositions, I was able to save time by not having to reanimate the walk cycle every time I needed him to go somewhere. This also works for backgrounds or environment objects, where it can be much easier to animate on their own, as not to be confused working on them in a more crowded and busy scene.

Now, I also used compositions to separate out individual scenes. For each separate scene I put together in a composition, I could edit how much of that scene or what order I wanted them in on the fly! It was very convenient and I will be happy to organize projects like this in the future.

But, to be more detailed, there was a lot more to it then just sticking everything in a composition and saying "That's good". This project tested my timing abilities and planning skills. If I didn't plan out the timing of a scene before hand, then one mistake meant I had to backtrack a lot to fix that mistake, which was never fun.

For example: the scene with the ships navigating the rocks took much longer then any other scene, because without a defined coordination to the ships, I was constantly redoing each collision to adjust.

And even when I did get a good deal of the timing down, I still feel that I needed more of a reaction when the ships hit the rocks. Everything moves a tad too smoothly and there needed to be more a jerk to each stop.

That scene had, by far, the most keyframes than any other, as seen on the left. it was the busiest scene in the short, and took the longest to produce in after effects.

(But even after all that, I regret nothing involving the attempt)

The last tool I revisited was the puppet pin tool, for a minor movement towards the middle. The puppet pin took is a good tool for living movements, but I had to use the opposing starch tool to hold the head in place.

With all these different tools set up to put my pieces into motion, I finished by placing the scenes together in a single composition, and exported it.

I and happy with the result, but I aspire to do better each time I attempt an animation. Soon I plan to incorporate shading and other physics aspects into my work.