Mixed Media Animation

The process of making this first began with a gathering of inspiration. For this particular animation I really liked the concept of not using the three lighting ideas I’d seen once I had decided to reintroduce these characters from my flipbook. As they are simple cartoony characters I thought I’d be fun to recreate the iconic eyes in the dark animation. Once I identified the two effects I wanted to recreate in my animation, one the swinging light effect and two the flashlight text reveal, I started storyboarding. This has become an integral part of my process. I've found acting as a visual checklist or map for myself even if I ended up tweaking the story a little bit during the process, I found that if I miss the storyboarding step I can stray away from the core concepts I want to achieve. As I had already a base for what these characters looked like it was simple to recreate them again in illustrator, all I had to do was ensure I separated all the layers so that I could move them around in after effects. For the motion portion, I broke down the animation into sections, I’d make the core motions for the first part (eg. the light swinging) then refine the movements (bending the rope to make it more realistic and adding the lighting effects) before moving onto the next section and repeating the process. One thing I found helpful as well was getting third opions which helped to catch things that I missed or dismissed which made me less biassed about things that I could have fixed.