Background
SFU Anime Spring 2021 Icebreaker Motion Graphic is a personal project that focuses on advertising the seasonal Club's Day event organized by the SFU Anime Club and was created using Adobe After Effects. I volunteered to take on this project because as it would be an opportunity for me to learn more about character animation and particle effects that I have never used in After Effects before.
Process
Initial Concept
After taking a look at the original poster created by SFU Anime, I quickly wrote and sketch down some of my ideas on how to breathe some life into the poster. The characters in the poster stood out especially to me because they present an opportunity for me to experiment with animating within After Effects. I also wanted to express the feeling of the spring season through the color palette with the sakura leaves falling from the tree.
Color and Theme
The colour palette was created using coolors.co and was chosen for the motion graphics as the poster was heavily inspired by the colours of the spring season with the pink colour of the cherry blossom taking centre stage and is the dominant colour with other accent colours highlighting it.
Challenge
An obvious challenge and the main reason why I decided to take on this project is animating the two mascots (Ren and Ayumi) from SFU Anime and the raccoon munching on the piece mochi. As the poster's main focus (other than the dates and name of the event) was on the actual characters, I decided to focus my attention on animating them both.
To animate Ren and Ayumi in this motion graphic, I decided to use the puppet pin tool built into After Effect as the character animation that I had in mind could be done most efficiently using the puppet pin tool. In addition, as the club could potentially reuse the animation in the future, using a feature built into After Effects would help the graphic designer from SFU Anime get up to speed quickly as they would be able to edit and make changes to the animation if request the original After Effects files.
After animating the first mascot using the puppet pin tool, I applied the same principle to the other mascot and animated the mouths of the two characters to add more detail to the animation using a combination of the puppet pin tool and the pen tool to create a fill background so it doesn't look out of place as the area behind the moving parts are blank in the original illustration.
To make it even more authentic, I have added the sakura leaves falling from the sakura tree using the particle world effect and the raccoon (the unofficial mascot of SFU) going towards the piece of mochi to eat to add a bit more spice and simulate real life as if the characters were actually in a Japanese park during the cherry blossom season.
Reflection
In creating this short motion graphic animation, I have gained an understanding of basic character animation in after effects using the puppet pin tool. After doing this project, I look forward to doing more character animation in after effects as it's given me the ability to breathe in life in a still 2D character. In particular, I was also able to apply this ability to animate the mascot of the SFU Anime's annual summer festival in a teaser trailer I created for them!
However, looking back, I would have loved to try out more methods of animation within After Effects as the puppet pin tool that I used have limitations on how it can be used as the puppet pin tool distort the layer in order to simulate animation and might not be applicable with every situation.
Check out the process behind other projects!
Motion Design - Character Trailer
KAFU (可不)
A fanmade motion graphic animation introducing KAFU (可不) from Kamitsubaki Studio
View KAFU (可不)