Synopsis

During production of the animation in After Effects i had some concerns as to how all the camera shots and scenes where going to work together, but after completely rendering the movie out and watching it as a whole completed sequence i am very happy with the way it all came together.

After obtaining a character design and construction for animation that i was happy with, I built the background scenes in photoshop and exported them as .png files
I created the character animation using flash and exported them as .swf files then imported them into After effects, where I placed them on top of the background scenes i had created in Photoshop.

Using some animation techniques in After effects i made sure the .swf movies where properly fitted to their surroundings and moved around the scenes as i had designed them to do. I found it too difficult to create the whole sequence as a single composition therefore i created it using various compositions which i fitted together at the end in a single composition. Next i created shadows for the character animations which proved a bit tricky, but in the end very effective. one of my favorite elements of After Effects are the lighting effects which i used in every scene, each with their own animation and timing, i feel that this added a vast amount to the collective atmosphere of the production.

One of the most challenging parts of the process i found was achieving the correct timing for all the sound effects. Not being able to hear the actual sounds on the main timeline makes it very difficult to match them to each animation composition, meaning that every sound clip had to be exactly the right length down to the specific frame!

With the sound now matching to the animation compositions, i animated camera effects in most of the scenes (street walk, stage performance 1,2,3) with the crowd scenes i just used scaling to create a zooming effect.

The final task i had was pasting each of the compositions in order and time within one large composition, and creating fade out effects where necessary so that one composition would move effectively to the next!