Summer Marketing Pre-roll Animation
Project Details
For this project, I am working with Lila and Shanda to create a 30 second animation that advertises UT’s Summer Online Courses. The animation will play before online courses held in the Spring. We decided that most of the animations will be done using the puppet tool in After Effects and that we will have one frame-by-frame animation at the end, since this is most time consuming.
Stage 1: Asset Creation
Character Designs
Our first step was to create all the assets, starting with characters. Lila found some base templates from Adobe Stock, and Shanda and I modified them to fit our needs. We added the dark outlines to the outside of the characters, and changed some of the clothingAbove are the five characters I edited.
Backgrounds
We also divided up the environments we were making. I was tasked with creating the park background that includes the Austin city skyline.
Putting Everything Together
The last step of the asset creation stage was to put the characters into the environments and prepare the Illustrator files for After Effects. This meant that each moveable element (character’s limbs, eyes, head, the dog’s tail, etc.) had to be on it’s own layer in Illustrator.
Stage 2: Frame-by-Frame Animation
While Lila and Shanda began the After Effects animations, I began working on the final call-to-action scene of the animation that shows the 3 main characters in front of the UT tower at graduation.
Here is the rough draft I created to establish timing:
And a cleaner version:
Next, I exported these frames as PNGs and moved them into Illustrator, where I can begin vectorizing each frame with the character models.
