"High Five Earl"

I taught my cat how to high five.

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Although this has little to do with animation, I thought it was something that needed to be shared. Oh, and I did use After Effects to put it together.

Effects Comparison

I really love before and after shots of effects in movies. It gives you a look into how the effects were accomplished.

Here are some before and after shots from my latest animation. All effects were done in After Effects.

The fade and blur around the edges helps to center the focus on the character.

Just in case you wanted to know what a man riding an upside down unicorn looks like. 

I didn't know what the character was drawing when I animated this piece so I had to add the unicorn in post.

This shot is composed of three completely separate animations. The thought bubble was shot on a green screen and the eyes were shot on video and cut out in photoshop.

There were guidelines draw in pencil on the paper that I removed in photoshop before animating.

Both the eyes and mouth were edited in photoshop before animating.

He is terribly sad.

In this shot, I added a faint reflection in the eyes. It was not in the original storyboards but I was using the same effect on another project and just thought it looked really good.

The fade and blur really help the draw the viewers attention the the center. Especially in this scene with so much clutter in the background.

Simple Green Screen Butterfly

I made this animated butterfly for an upcoming project. I decided to build a larger model than what would appear on screen, shoot it in front of a green screen, and shrink it down in post. I thought this process would be easier than building a tiny model and trying to animate it on set. Also, this model needed to be suspended in mid air with wires and removing wires on a green screen is relatively easy to do. Although the process looks somewhat difficult, with the right software it is actually very simple.

I started with my model suspended on a wire. I have already removed the wire so it is not visible in this example. I animated the butterfly and brought the completed frames into After Effects.

In After Effects, I shrunk the butterfly down to about 5% percent of it's original size. I then animated the flight path simply by changing the butterflies position and adding keyframes along the timeline. You can change the curve of the path by dragging the bezier handles at the beginning and end of the path.

I removed the green screen with the Keylight 1.2 effect in After Effects. It is one of the easiest plugins to use. All you need to do is choose the color you would like to remove by selecting the eye dropper next to the "Screen Colour" swatch and choose the color you would like to remove from within your animation. There are several adjustment tools to play with to get the exact look you want.

I then added the background and changed the color from purple to yellow using the Photo Filter effect. I also adding a glow to enhance the light reflecting off of the wings.

Here is a video of the different stages of development.