Project: Animated 30 minute animation aimed at young children
Role: Freelance After Effects Animator
Year: 2012
Fun in the sun, sea and sand is the scene for this animated adventure. Follow the adventures of Monty, SuSu and all of the tropical islanders - who will make you feel happy!
When I started this project I had approximately 4 years experience of using After Effects professionally, but this was my first long-form project using the software. This was an opportunity for me to hone in on my knowledge of coding expressions. We needed to automate parts of the animation, such as making the characters blink and moving their fingers across guitar frets. I decided to isolate the musical components such as the bass and melody, and used the amplitude values to drive the characters different movements. We used a program call Crazy Talk to animate the lips to the dialogue and songs, it's a handy tool for quickly creating lip synced mouths and the style worked for this type of illustration.
At the time I was staying at the lead animators house, while he was away, to look after his chickens. Each morning I would feed the chickens, and then worked away un-disturbed for 20 hour stints only stopping for the essentials. It was a unique opportunity for me to work on this project so I was determined to get it done and this was the perfect environment to get in that head space. After 5 days I’d completed the animation on each of my sections.
We were really pleased with the results. The animation synced really well in the music sections and the entire production had a lot of movement. Considering the duration and the size of the team, we pulled off a mean feat.
This project taught me to plan my compositions, and that experimentation is essential on every project to find solutions. You need to think out of the box to find the most suitable techniques, all the while considering quality and budget. I also loved the illustrations and found it fascinating to bring them to life in After Effects.
