My project for course: Hand-Drawn Digital Animation: Bring Illustrations to Life

My project for course: Hand-Drawn Digital Animation: Bring Illustrations to Life

The assignment for the final project was to create a short, looped animation where a character turned into a shape and back, and to have that animation fit into a variety of aspect ratios. I considered a few different concepts including an astronaut turning into a comet with a “Little Prince” feel, or a witch turning into raven. Ultimately, I decided to develop this playful idea of a cow turning into a piece of cheese. I wanted to do something more cartoony rather than illustrative or abstract, as practice for the style I ultimately want to pursue in my future animation work.

I originally was going to have the cow jump high enough that the ground would no longer be visible, and then after the transformation the cheese would return to the ground where a picnic blanket and plate would be waiting. I decided this was unnecessarily complex for the short piece.

The rough animation, in-betweens and tie-downs were done in Adobe Animate. I then imported that animation as an image sequence into Photoshop, where I could use textured brushes to paint and colour the elements and achieve the effect I wanted. I also created background plates in Photoshop. Everything was then assembled in After Effects, where I added a bit of parallax movement to the background to accentuate the jump motion. I added a looped texture animation atop the whole thing to add a bit of grit.