Megan Hastings

Aquaration

My roles in this motion activity were asset designer, animator, and editor. All of the assets were first sketched then outline and coloured using Adobe Photoshop. The character’s model was divided into multiple layers to be manipulated later in the animation process. Each fish was also divided into their own layers.

The environment was separated two; the foreground (fish tank & gravel) and the background (the figures behind). This helped stage the scene in a more dynamic way with the character rig in between.

The assets were then imported into different compositions in Adobe After Effects then were placed into the master comp.

The character was first animated using rigged animation, parenting layers together and repositioning anchor points. When keyframing the main poses, After Effects automatically applied motion in between the frames.

Used squash & stretch, anticipation, and exaggeration when moving or changing expressions. The side hair pieces used follow through and overlapping action (drag) when the character moved suddenly. Slow in and slow out (easing) was used throughout the whole animation.

The fishes were duplicated animated afterwards by panning them across the screen. Bubbles were also animated to give more life to the fish. 

The animation’s title in the credits was animated using a wiggle effect to appear floating in water.

Turbulent displace effect was applied onto an adjustment layer above all the layers to give the illusion of moving water in the aquarium. 

Chefbot's Kitchen

I created this robot animation using Adobe Illustrator, After Effects, and Photoshop. First, I started off with importing my robot puppet into a new After Effects project. I shifted the placement of the anchor point for all parts of the character and parented layers to each other so when I move or rotate one layer, multiple layers will follow the change. Then I started working on the animation by following the principles of animation.

For the steam of the pancakes, I followed a tutorial to create the effect: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSslg0puTDs&t=668s 

I was inspired by the style older cartoons such as: The Jetsons, The Flintstones, Bewitched, I dream of Jeanie and Tom & Jerry and wanted to create my animation to appear as such. I followed a tutorial to create a retro effect and RGB effect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXtRc84o-WU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De8KHhLndkM

I created these effects first applying a drop shadow onto the character’s animation com and reducing the opacity to 25%. Then on an adjustment layer, I applied multiple effects: Gaussian Blur, Sharpen, Curves, Transform (Wiggle Effect), and Noise.

For the RGB effect, I imported the comp three times into a new comp and applied ‘Shift Channel’ onto each comp. I then isolated each comp as a colour channel. I subtly then shifted 2 of the comps to the right/left to show the RGB effect. 

Rather than leave the background as a solid colour, I drew out a retro 60’s kitchen in Photoshop, using multiple references.

I also created an opening and ending credits to really push the vibe of it being a retro cartoon.

As a stretch goal, I made a soundtrack using Adobe Audition made a timeline for when to place sounds throughout the animation. 

Overall, I'm super happy with the final outcome of both motion graphic animations. They were really fun to make and have had experience creating animations like these before and to see the progression of how far I’ve come is amazing to see.