Picture House - Final Piece

Animating my main piece certainly proved to be a challenge for a number of reasons.

My initial idea for animating it was more of a side to side, parallax style animation, to show off the depth of the drawing.

I drew the piece in Procreate, and did the animation in After Effects.

While drawing, I tried to use layer groups in order to keep the different areas of the piece separate, however I did not do everything I needed to the first time to make the import into After Effects smooth. I learnt a lot of hard lessons during this stage.

While I was drawing, I didn't quite manage to get it into my head that I needed to prepare for animation, so areas that would usually not be visible, would be by the end. The main area where this caused a problem was the texturing for the ground. If the layer of the ground had an area in front of it that covered some of it, I just didn't texture it to save time. When I was trying to animate the first time, I realised just how much of an issue this caused and ended up having to redraw all of the areas of the piece that were green in order to fix it, and start animating all over again. I lost a lot of time to that little slip up, so I doubt I'd make that same mistake again.

Another thing that I would've done differently is the canvas size. I knew that I wanted the final piece to be 720p, so when choosing a size for my canvas, I made it that size. I now know that I should have made it much wider, to allow for the side to side animation I had in mind. This would not have been a feasible thing to fix with the amount of time left, so I instead decided to adapt the way I would animate it. Rather than the side to side, I chose to make each layer move upwards into frame at different speeds, so that it would still demonstrate depth like I had wanted. In the end, I much preferred this, so I'm calling it a happy accident.

On top of everything else, the way I coloured the ground and the way I made it nighttime were overlays, which I couldn't properly import into After Effects. This was a relatively easy thing to fix, but it was annoying nonetheless.

With the problems all fixed, I was finally able to animating properly. I was very happy with the way I made the selection arrow move around the screen- I would say that it looked rather sleek.

If I could do anything differently with the animation itself, maybe I would add a little more motion to it, something small like the orb floating in place, or a flock of birds in the sky. I also might have added a little bit of shadow behind the game title to integrate it into the scene a little better. These are things I should definitely learn how to do for the future.

Overall, I am extremely pleased with what I created. While I did have to adjust some things, it ended up being almost exactly what I pictured in my mind.