The way I work - After Effect part

by Francis Caron 4:04 PM 38 Things you said

Hello there,

You don't need to see how I did the drawing to understand what I'll be talking about on this new post. If you suddenly feel like you need to know the way I draw, just click on the link ... right ... THERE which is the drawing I used to make the animation that you can see on the pow ... POW!

First of all, as I draw on photoshop, I always keep my different objects on separate layers to help me use them well in AfterEffect afterward. In that way, I will a lot of time but if you haven't done it, you can cut the picture.

For Raphael, I had to cut his shoulders to make a second layer of broader shoulders which would be used in the effect of breathing. I also added two different drawings of eyes: One that is half-closed and the other one completely closed. That will be enough to make a good eye blinking. Finally, as Raphael is a bad-ass, I could make his mouth move a little to show his rage. This is also a layers I did in photoshop before importing everything because it saves me a lot of time in that way. If you are better at AE than PS, you might do it in another way.

Using only one composition, I do all my animation of the turtle. As I have a separate body part (his hand and weapon) I use another composition to make the movements. It's a 3 second loop I did for that one so the moves have to be quite gentle.

It all looks too green and once over the background, it looks even worse ... that's normal ... and weirdly, I did that on purpose because I had planned to make it all grey-ish.

Once every layer is ready, I put all of them in a new composition where I'll work on them to look good all together. Something I like to do to create 3D layers which is a great strength of After Effect. I will use a camera to slightly shake and give the impression of somebody holding a camera. This should give more life to the animation as something too static is a bit boring to me.

Once the 3D layers are done, I often just try new things with the color modes and some effects to give each animation a different style.

I'll repeat again so that nobody comes and tell me that I did what and what wrong: I'm only showing the way I do it, I'm not telling it's the perfect way to work or anything.

You can see the other turtles animated:
Leo
Don
Mike (coming soon)

Leave a comment if you have any questions and thanks for watching!