After Effects Project

So below is the unedited and the final edited version of my animation for the After Effects project. :} Involved rig removal, green-screen, changing the brightness on every other frame, a few meltdowns, and the sparkles!

Unedited After Effects project from Laura Jones on Vimeo.

After Effects final from Laura Jones on Vimeo.

Oh, and since I seem to be dreadful at keeping my blog up to date, here's a link to my instagram below. Full of doodles, animation, gigs and my cat. :}

A photo posted by Laura Jones (@fantanazz) on Jul 7, 2014 at 2:08pm PDT

A broom, hat and wands!

My new armature looking all fancy. Extra joint in the spine. oooo 

During this part of the project I was crazy ill, so taking photos of the making process wasn't really a priority at the time. Here's a little doodle of how I made the broom. :}

1. Twisted wire to the size I wanted the broom.

2. Glued a bit of K&S to the side to create a rigging point.

3. Sewed brown felt around the wire. The K&S gave the broom a cool ridged look. :)

4. Sewed copper wire to the end of the broom to make it animate-able. (Is that a word?) 

5. Then stitched the wool over the top! 

Broom & rig. aw

 Spot the rigging point.

First test of animating the broom on my bedroom floor. ^_^ 

Now onto the hat! 

1. Measured the size of the armature head and then cut the bottom part of the hat out of black felt.

2. Ugh Maths. Literally the first time I've needed to know about circumference and all that nonsense since GCSEs. But yeah, Maths happened to find out the cone measurements.

3. Stitched the cone up. 

4. Sewed the cone and the bottom together. TaDa!

  

I made four different kinds of wands, it's nice to have a choice. ^_^ Glued teeny magnets onto the bottom so it would be easier for the armature to keep hold. 

  

Wooah last post was in July? Oops. 

Ooookay, so I'm currently in the middle of pre-production on my final project in uni, scary stuff! But I'll save all that for another post, which will probably be posted a trillion years after the deadline.

The latest project was to animate and then use After Effects to make it all snazzy/get our heads around using the programme. I wanted to use an effect that you'd also have to use in live action so magic was the first thing to come to my mind. Magic = Fun. If there's a TV Show with a witch, there's no doubt that, that character will be my favourite, so it was decided! My armature was going to be a witch!

I already had the idea to animate the character casting a spell, I just needed to decided what kind of spell. My alternative option was to animate a witch on a broom, so I combined both ideas and came up with a sort of Fantasia themed animation, where a broom comes to life. 

Below are some quick thumbnails of ideas and key poses. ^_^

(Thumbnails/plan)

Keeping in mind I hadn't the foggiest idea how to use After Effects, I had to decide what effects I was going to use. Which was kinda stressful considering I unsuccessfully tried to create fire while listening to a tutorial by what sounded like a 8 year old boy.

But I got there in the end! Take that 8 year old boy! I can also make fire! IT'S CUBES! It's just blurred cubes! 

 

I wanted some sort of effect to come out of the wand to show the direction of the spell. In the end my aim was for that 90s sparkle effect, like in Sabrina the Teenage Witch/Buffy.

Below is my first test of the sparkles. Colour change and everything!