After Effects & Animation (Spring 2017)

Creating Characters

There isn’t really a right or wrong way to design a character; the kinds of characters you choose to make is ultimately a matter of artistic preference.  We can, however, learn a lot by listening to the advice of other artists and animators.  In his book Making Comics, Scott McCloud suggests that there are three qualities that a successful character must possess: an inner life, visual distinction, and expressive traits.  Without these qualities, a character might be confusing, flat, or – worst of all – forgettable.

A character’s inner life relates to their “unique history, worldview and desires.”  This includes a character’s backstory, personality, archetype, and more.  Visual distinction means that a character has” a distinct and memorable body, face, and wardrobe.”  This has to do with a character’s physical characteristics.  Expressive traits are “traits of speech and behavior associated with that character.”  A character’s expressive traits are what make them move and speak in a unique and interesting way – this could include posture, body language, facial expressions, and more.

Backstory

In order to be successful, even a very simple character should have a backstory.  While you certainly don’t need to know every detail of a character’s life history – McCloud writes that “obsessing too much over such details is a classic beginner’s mistake” – you should certainly have a sense of a character’s personal identity.

Some characters are defined by specific moments in their history.  Superhero stories often utilize moments like this – think about the origin stories of Spiderman and Batman.  Other characters are defined by their desires – something that motivates them and causes narrative conflict.  Every character in The Wizard of Oz has a clear desire that motivates their actions.  Still other characters fit into certain archetypes.  Star Wars makes great use of archetypal characters: the naive hero beginning a quest, the lovable rogue, the princess, the wise old man, etc.  Your characters can be defined by their history, their desires, their archetype, or some combination thereof – the important thing is that you know and understand them.

Shape and Silhouette

Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons and Futurama has a theory of good character design that has helped him create some of the most iconic characters in the history of animation.  “The secret of designing cartoon characters — and I’m giving away this secret now to all of you out there — is: you make a character that you can tell who it is in silhouette. I learned this from watching Mickey Mouse as a kid. You can tell Mickey Mouse from a mile away…those two big ears. Same thing with Popeye, same thing with Batman. And so, if you look at the Simpsons, they’re all identifiable in silhouette. Bart with the picket fence hair, Marge with the beehive, and Homer with the two little hairs, and all the rest. So…I think about hair quite a lot.”

One way to give a character a distinctive silhouette is by using basic shapes as a starting point.  By using a square, circle, or triangle as a starting point, you can give your character a unique look that is easily recognizable.  Of course, you can – and should – elaborate on these basic shapes, but they can be a great starting point.

Shapes can also tell the audience a great deal about a character’s personality.  Think about Ellie and Carl in the Pixar film Up – everything about Carl is square and blocky, which makes him seem gruff and serious.  Ellie is made up of curved lines and circles, so she seems free-spirited and whimsical by comparison.

I’d also suggest using lots of reference images when you’re designing your characters.  Don’t feel like you can only draw from your own imagination –there is absolutely nothing wrong with using other images, or even other artists’ characters, as a point of inspiration. Just be sure that you make the finished character your own.

Body Language and Speech

Does your character slouch or stand up straight?  Do they fidget?  Walk with a limp?  Speak with an accent or use particular idioms?  These are some of what McCloud calls “expressive traits.”  Whereas visual distinction has to do with physical appearance, expressive traits are related to what your character does.

Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki does a masterful job of using physicality to reveal aspects of a character to the audience.  In My Neighbor Totoro, older sister Satsuki is graceful and precise while younger sister Mei is comparatively clumsy.  The way each character moves tells the audience about their age, personality, and relationship to each other.  Satsuki flits across the screen while Mei crashes after her.

McCloud suggests defining key poses or facial expressions for your characters.  These are physical cues unique to each character.  It could be the way someone cocks their head to the side, or leans against a doorframe, or looks over the tops of their glasses.  As the audience gets to know your character, these key actions will become associated with their respective characters and help make them seem more rounded and alive.

You can also use expressive traits to play against a character’s physical appearance.  A hulking, brutish looking character could tiptoe fearfully or a meek-looking character could pose heroically.  There are endless options.

Designing for Animation

We’re not going to dive too deeply into how to use programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, but there are some things to keep in mind.  First, remember the abilities and limitations of After Effects when you are creating your character.  We’ll be animating using keyframed transform properties like rotation and position as well as puppet pin deformation.  This gives us a lot of flexibility, but it also means that some things are more difficult to animate than others.  Wild, elaborate hair, for example and flowing fabric will be challenging to animate in After Effects.  That said, you can often find creative solutions to such problems, so don’t sacrifice your vision.

Second, remember to think in layers.  When a Photoshop or Illustrator file is imported, we can retain the layer structure.  If you want something to move independently, put it on its own layer.  As a very general guideline, a good layer breakdown might include the head, facial features, torso, hips, upper and lower arms, hands, upper and lower legs, and feet.  The more elaborate and detailed your character is, the more layers you’ll have to create (and eventually animate).

Finally, think about how your character is going to appear in the animation you will eventually be creating.  If your character is only ever going to appear from the front, you might only need a frontal view – but if your character is going to be seen from the side, behind, or above, you’ll need to create those views as well.  Also think about how closely you’ll be seeing your character on screen.  While Illustrator files can be scaled up without distorting, Photoshop files will pixelate if you zoom in too far.  If you’re creating your character in Photoshop, make them big enough to be usable, or create multiple versions at different resolutions.

Drawing Inside After Effects

After Effects does not have the same breadth of drawing tools that dedicated programs like Photoshop, Sketchbook, Gimp, or Illustrator do.  However, its tools are robust enough to be used in certain situations and animation styles.  After Effects’ shape tools allow you to control the path, fill, and stroke of shapes, so it’s fairly easy to create relatively simple characters directly within the program.

There are some distinct benefits to building your puppet within After Effects.  For one, since shapes in After Effects are vector-based, they can be scaled up infinitely with no loss in quality.  Creating your puppet within After Effects also means that you have one less file to keep track of and you don’t need to “round-trip” between After Effects and another program to make changes.  Finally, creating a puppet within After Effects lets you keyframe and control aspects of the character in unique ways; for example, you could keyframe the path of a shape or the thickness of its stroke.  That kind of direct control is only possible when creating characters directly within After Effects.

The biggest downside to drawing your puppet within After Effects is that you just don’t have as many options at your disposal.  After Effects is not really a drawing program, so its interface and toolset aren’t designed around that purpose.  That being said, there is still a lot of latitude within the program and you shouldn’t discount it as a possibility.

If you want to use this method, I’d suggest starting with a sketch and then importing it into After Effects.  You can then use the pen and shape tools to trace the sketch in After Effects.  Note that you can actually have multiple shapes – with different fills, strokes, and paths – on the same shape layer, which can help keep your composition a bit more manageable.  However, every part of your puppet that needs to move independently should be on its own layer.

Talented (and profane) animator Ross Plaskow utilizes this method in some of his animation tutorials.

https://youtu.be/fXL9bVnX8fU

Using Photoshop

Photoshop’s biggest asset is probably its ability to modify and utilize other images.  Images can be distorted, manipulated, and combined in very interesting ways.  Photoshop also has very advanced drawing tools – if you are an artist with a traditional drawing background, using Photoshop and a pen tablet may be an easy transition for you.

Photoshop is very well suited for creating characters with texture, shading, and rough edges.  If you want your character to have a hand-drawn look, Photoshop is probably your best choice.  It’s also a great tool for collaging or importing your own artwork.  If you aren’t comfortable drawing digitally, one option is to draw your character by hand, scan it, then separate the layers in Photoshop.

Layers are one thing you’ll need to be mindful of regardless of the method you choose to make your character.  Think about how you want your character to move and let that dictate the structure of your character.  If your character has a long flowing scarf, for instance, that scarf should probably be on its own layer.  Other objects that don’t need to move independently (such as the buttons on a character’s jacket) can be combined with other layers.

Another thing you’ll need to consider regardless of your method is the way that layers overlap and interact with each other.  In Plaskow’s tutorial above, he mentions that overlapping body parts should have curved ends.  This allows two layers – for example, the upper and lower arm, which meet at the elbow – to rotate around each other without creating strange blocky shapes.  Of course, if you plan on animating parts of your character using puppet pins, they will be set up differently.  As mentioned in the previous lesson, keep the way your character is supposed to move in mind as you draw them out.

One thing you’ll want to be sure of when drawing in Photoshop is that the background behind your character is transparent.  By default, Photoshop makes a white base layer, so you may need to delete this.

One nice feature about Photoshop and Illustrator files is that you can turn off the visibility for layers.  The layer will still be there when you import the file into After Effects and you can re-enable its visibility.  So, if you want to draw multiple mouths or eyes for your character, you can make them in the same Photoshop file and simply hide the layers.

Another nice feature of working in Adobe software is that you can continue to update your file even after it’s imported into After Effects.  You need to be careful not to change the overall file structure, but you can continue to make alterations right up until you render your finished video.

Overall, Photoshop is a great tool for puppet creation.  The major downside is that the files you create will eventually become pixelated and distorted as you zoom in on them.  If you keep this limitation in mind, you can use it to make almost anything.

Using Illustrator

While Illustrator and Photoshop have similar toolsets and interfaces, they “feel” different in practice.  You can import still images into Illustrator, just like in Photoshop, but the program is really designed around drawing with curves.  You can create gradients and patterns, but you won’t get the same textural results that you do in Photoshop.  Characters created in Illustrator tend to have clean lines, uniform colors, and be composed of relatively simple shapes.

When working in Illustrator, you can actually have multiple groups of shapes within each layer.  When you import the file in After Effects, only the top-level layers will be recognized, so group your shapes accordingly.

Whatever method you use, remember to name your layers as you go.  If your puppet has its right eye and left eye on separate layers, name them accordingly.  It’s going to be a frustrating process if you import your character into After Effects and see “Layer 1, Layer 2, Layer 2 copy,” etc.

The benefit of using Illustrator is that you have access to a very full-featured tool for creating layered vector artwork – artwork that can be scaled up as much as you want without becoming pixelated.  The downside is that most Illustrator art tends to be fairly simplistic in terms of color and shape.  If you like a simple aesthetic, however, it’s probably a good choice.

Designing a memorable, real-realized character is challenging, but it can also be a lot of fun.  If you find yourself getting stuck, pick a theme or point of inspiration and start elaborating on it.  If you give your character a personal history, a unique look with a recognizable silhouette, and a style of movement and speech that fits their personality, your character will come to life in exciting ways.

Project 6: Make A Friend

Believe it or not, it’s time to start planning for the mid-semester project.  The project will be a (very) short film utilizing a character that you design and create.  I’ll post the full details and theme soon, but you should focus on creating a character – human, animal, or other – to use.  I will tell you in advance that dialog will not be a part of the mid-semester project, so you don’t need to worry about doing lip-synch.  Yet.

Create a character in Illustrator, Photoshop, or After Effects.  The character should be separated into layers appropriately and ready to import into After Effects for rigging.  If you would like to draw your character and scan it (or something similar), that is totally fine.  Send me your character – and their name – in whatever format you choose by class next Wednesday.

The Illusion of Life

Let’s take care of a few more basics in After Effects and move on to character animation.  While After Effects is most often used for effects work and motion graphics, its versatile toolset makes it a very capable tool for animation.

Adjustment Layers

Adjustment layers are a very cool feature found in After Effects and some video and photo editing programs.  Basically, an adjustment layer is a blank layer in the timeline.  Any effects that you add to an adjustment layer will be applied to the layers beneath it.  Any layers above the adjustment layer will be unaffected.  This allows you to quickly apply effects to an entire scene.  If, for example, you decide you want your composition to be in black and white, you can add an adjustment layer and apply the “tint” effect to it.  Without the adjustment layer, you would have to go to each layer individually and apply the effect.

To create one, go the the Layer drop-down menu at the top of the page and go to New>Adjustment Layer.   An adjustment layer the size of your current composition will be created and placed in the timeline.  After Effects also lets you modify adjustment layers in interesting ways by using masks.  For example, you can use a circular subtract mask on an adjustment layer to create a simple vignette.  Note that while adjustment layers have transform properties, modifying those properties does not affect the layers below – only effects are applied.

If you do want to apply things like scale and rotation using an adjustment layer, it ispossible, however.  In the “Distort” section of the effects, there is one called “Transform.”  This is a set of the usual transform properties – anchor point, position, scale, rotation, and opacity – that can be applied as an effect.  If you add the transform effect to an adjustment layer, that effect will be applied to the layers below.

Pre-composing

When you create a new composition in After Effects, it appears in the project panel along with the rest of your media – that’s because compositions essentially are pieces of media, just like stills and video files.  This means that you can drag one composition into another and then add effects, mask it, or manipulate its transform properties.  In fact, it’s quite common to have compositions within compositions within compositions for a complex project.

In addition to dragging one composition into another, you can choose certain layers within an open composition and make a new composition out of them – without ever leaving the timeline you are working in.  After Effects calls this “pre-composing.”

To pre-compose media in the timeline, select the desired layers (command-click to choose more than one layer), right-click and select Pre-Compose….  A menu will appear with options for re-naming the new composition (probably a good idea), leaving or moving the “attributes” of the layers (choose to move them), adjusting the length of the new composition (choose to do this), and opening the new composition (not necessary).

Once the layers have been pre-composed, the new composition will appear in the old composition as a single layer.  It will also show up as a new composition in the list of project media.  If you double-click on the pre-composition, it will open up in the timeline and preview windows.  Pre-composing media is a great way to clean up a chaotic composition (sometimes you just have way too many layers in there), as well as a simple method of applying effects and transformations to multiple layers at once.

Parenting

Parenting is a unique feature in After Effects and it’s incredibly powerful.  When you parent one layer to another, the “child” layer will be affected by the scale, position, and rotation of the “parent” layer.  Parenting does not affect opacity, effects, or masks.

To parent a layer, you use the Parent section of the composition panel.  You can either choose the parent layer from the drop-down menu or use the “pick whip” selector next to it (it looks like a little swirl).  A parent layer can have multiple child layers connected to it – and a child layer can have its own child layers – but a child layer cannot have multiple parent layers.  That probably sounds confusing, but it should quickly make sense once you start playing with it.

Parenting has some very basic and commonplace applications for things like lower thirds and title design.  For example, you could parent a text layer to a solid layer, then animate the solid layer sliding into the frame.  The text will keep its position relative to the solid and slide in with it.  This keeps your animation consistent and means that you only need to keyframe properties on one layer instead of two.

Under the Layer drop-down menu, you can also create a “Null” object (Layer>New>Null Object).  Null objects don’t appear to do anything at first, but they are very useful as parent layers.  You can parent several child layers to a null and then affect them all simultaneously.

Simple Character Rigging

Now that we know how to parent objects, pre-compose layers, and adjust anchor points, we can move on to actual character animation.  Let’s start with some simple pre-made figures – you can download a few at this link.

A simple puppet might have the figure’s arms, legs, head, and body on different layers.  Complex puppets will break down the figure more and more – you might have separate layers for parts of the face, finger segments, clothing, and more.  Basically, any part of the figure that you want to animate should be on its own layer.

You can import these layers individually, but After Effects is also very good at playing with files created in other Adobe programs.  If you create your puppet in Photoshop or Illustrator, you can import those files with their layer structure intact.  When you import an Illustrator or Photoshop file, simply change the Import As drop-down from “Footage” to “Composition – Retain Layer Sizes.”  (The “Composition” option will work also, but I find “Retain Layer Sizes” easier to work with.)  If you’re using a Photoshop file, another screen may appear with the option to keep or merge your layer styles – I tend to choose “merge.”  Once you’ve imported the file, it will appear as its own composition with each layer separated out.  Note that you will only get the dialog box with these import options if you use  Cmd+I or File>Import – if you just drag an Illustrator or Photoshop file into the project window, all the layers will be combined into one piece of media.

With the puppet imported, you’ll want to begin parenting the different parts together – but first, you should think about each layer’s anchor point.  As we discussed previously, a layer’s anchor point is the point around which the layer scales and rotates.  Since we’ll be doing most of our animation using the rotation property, the anchor point is important.  For example, a hand rotates around the wrist, the forearm rotates around the elbow, and the upper arm rotates around the shoulder.  You can use the “pan behind” tool (its icon has four directional arrows in a dashed box – the shortcut is Y) to grab and move anchor points to their appropriate locations.

You can then parent the layers accordingly – in this example, the hand is parented to the forearm, the forearm is parented to the upper arm, and the upper arm is parented to the torso.  If you do this correctly, rotating the forearm will also move the hand and rotating the upper arm will move all three.  I realize that this is probably difficult to visualize, so take some time to play with parenting and anchor points.  Imagine your puppet is a marionette and think about where the hinges should be – that’s where your anchor points go.  Once the anchor points have been set and the layers have been parented, you can begin animating the puppet by rotating and moving the layers.  Don’t forget to turn keyframes on for any properties you want to animate!

One benefit to creating your puppets in Illustrator (or using shape layers within After Effects) is that the puppet can be scaled up infinitely without losing quality.  That’s because Illustrator is a vector-based program, as opposed to something like Photoshop, which uses pixels.  To enable this ability (it is turned off by default), you need to check a box in the timeline that looks like a little sun – if you hover your mouse over it, it will say “For vector layer: Continuously Rasterize.”  For pixel-based artwork, you will start to lose image quality as you scale up, but you can control how After Effects processes the image using the column next to the sun that looks like a pixelated diagonal line.

Puppet Pins

While animating using the transform properties can achieve very sophisticated results, the animated characters can sometimes look a little stiff.  When we watch a cartoon, we are accustomed to seeing things move in “elastic” way: stretching as they build up speed and squashing when they land.  We can achieve this effect in After Effects using Puppet Pins.

Set up your character in the same way we went over last time: position the anchor points on the joints, move the layers into position, and parent everything appropriately.  Once everything is in place, it’s time to add some pins.

Puppet Pins are a tool for deforming layers.  When you add pins to something in After Effects, the program generates a “mesh” over the object.  When you move a pin, that mesh shifts and the layer is deformed.  If you move a pin too much, you’ll get some funky results; the image will stretch too much and begin to tear.  Moving a pin just a bit can give some really interesting results, though.

To start adding pins, select the Puppet Pins tool from the menu bar at the top of the screen – it’s the one that looks like a pushpin.  In the timeline, select the layer you want to add pins to, then click on the layer in the composition panel to add a pin.  You should see a yellow dot appear where you clicked.

Every pin you add will “pin down” a part of the object.  That means that the more pins you add, the smaller the area that each pin will affect.  My general rule is to add three pins to each part of the puppet I want to animate in this way.  On an arm layer, I might add a pin near the shoulder, one near the elbow, and one near the wrist.  On a leg layer, I might add one near the hip, one near the knee, and one near the ankle.

Pins have keyframes turned on by default, so you will add a keyframe every time you move a pin.  However, you can still move or rotate the layer itself without adding pin keyframes.  I like to add pin keyframes to accentuate movements; for example, I might add pins to a swinging arm to give the movement some elasticity.  Note that pins are not affected by parenting layers to each other – they move independently.  If you can’t see the pins, you can highlight the layer and click on the Puppet Pins tool again, or find the Puppet section of the layer in the timeline.

Occasionally, your pin may pull the layer apart in an unexpected way.  This is usually because the mesh that the tool generates is not covering the entire object.  When you have the Puppet Pins tool active, you should see some options next to the tool icon at the top of the screen.  Clicking “Show” box next to “Mesh” will reveal the mesh that is being generated to deform the layer.  If your mesh is cutting off part of the object, either add triangles or increase the “Expansion” property.

Puppet Pins open up lots of new creative possibilities.  Use them to make your animations seem even more alive!

Project 5: Bring a Character to Life

This week, I’d like you to start experimenting with character animation.  You can download the sample files to use or create a puppet of your own.  If you choose to create your own puppet, you can use several approaches: you can create it in Illustrator or Photoshop, draw it on paper and scan it, or build it out of shapes and solids within After Effects.  Don’t get too bogged down in the character creation process, though – we’ll be focusing on actually creating characters next week.

Either way, create a five to ten second scene with the character of your choosing.  You can animate using transform properties, puppet pins, or a combination of the two.  As usual, render it as a QuickTime movie using the H.264 codec, upload it to your Google Drive, and send me a download link.