For our final project of the year from Sara, we were set a collaborative task to put together 22 videos all made by each person in our class, which, when played together, would show sea creatures swimming in and out of the frames and would make one consecutive piece. Since being absent from the character After Effects project, I initially struggled with coming to grips with making my animal have individual layers on a PSD document. I chose an Axolotl - thinking this would be easier to do as it just swims along. I use block colours and went over a base image in Photoshop, separating out each layer.
I learned throughout the entire process to make the image as simple as possible, as I found it really difficult to subtly move the legs without showing where I'd cut around the older image, so it didn't look quite as realistic as I intended - I chose to make the animal blink, and instead worked on things that would make the piece more realistic instead of re-doing the animal; this involved me generating bubbles on After Effects and using a layer to create the light shining into the sea. This made the whole piece a lot more realistic.
When creating the moving Axolotl, I chose to create something very fluid and give the animal some life by making it move, the animal needed to be "scared" by something because of the jerky movement half way through. I then created more bubbles to generate, and added fish quickly made in Photoshop and used key frames to move it along.
Overall, this utilized all the skills I've learned in After Effects so far, it didn't take as long as initially expected, so was able to add a lot more effects and spend more time focusing on the smaller details. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, however I probably would have used more detail on the animal itself and fixed the issue with the legs not being able to move as far as I'd have liked, as he looks quite still/frozen. The overall presentation at the end was really interesting for me to see as it was nice to see everyone's styles come together.
