Animating The Ghostie Character in Adobe After Effects

Now I had created the character and separated the body parts into their own layers it was time to import it into After Effects and start animating the character. In this environment the layers from the character file as treated as their own layers in the time-line, similarly to how video and sound in Final Cut can be separated onto different channels in the time-line. I dragged the appropriate files from the project files (left) onto the timeline.

The next step is to animate each element. Animation in After Effects is done by changing values of properties on the object that is to be animated, in this example I have animated one of the wings of the ghost. I can expand the layer to bring up the transformation properties in the time-line and manipulate the rotation by changing the rotation value (pictured to the left) or rotate it manually in the project preview. The number manipulated in the screen shot is the angle of rotation, a '90' value creates a 90 degree turn for example. Effects and other tools in after effects give elements more properties to manipulate but I have only used the base transformation properties for this animation. Changing the value (like in the above screenshot) will only change the property for that given moment in the timeline, to animate over time I use a common process in After Effects that animates a property over a given time.

Animating a property over time is a similar process to adjusting a property. The 'stop watch' icon beside the property needs to be pressed at the desired point in the time to tell the program that you want the animation to start at that point by creating a key-frame. The needle-head is then moved through the time-line to the desired point in time for the animation to complete; changing the property at this point will create another key-frame - this creates an animation. Scrolling between these key-frames will show the gradual change in the rotation as shown above in the demonstration. Essentially this can be applied to any object and property, this is the corner stone of animating digitally with After Effects. I can copy and paste these keyframes onto the rotation of the second wing so the movement of each wing is precise without me having to re-create the key-frames. I can build the animation up by animating properties of different elements. However before I start animating the wings (and eyes) and I need to adjust the anchor points and parent them to the ghost.



Be default, the wings will rotate around the centre of the object which in this case would be very inappropriate. I wanted the wing to rotate around the ghost's shoulder giving the illusion of there being a joint between the wing and the ghost. Each object has an anchor point (shown above), this can be moved to change the centre of rotation for the object; it is moved either manually on screen by dragging the anchor point on the object to the desired location or by changing the anchor point properties in a similar manor to other transformation properties.

Characters made up of several parts like this in After Effects can be 'parented' together, what this means is that layers can copy a layer's transformations exactly but can still animate on its own. I've used this to parent every body part to the main body of the ghost. In this example I can parent the wings to the body to ensure they move up and down when I move the main body around, but I can also animate the wings to flap without having to worry about trying to move them up and down with the other body parts. I can parent by dragging the 'pic-whip' icon (pictured above) from the wing to the wing to the body to parent it (like a rope) or select the parent layer from the drop-down menu. Once I parented everything correctly I could animate the body's position to make the ghost move around.

To animate the eyes I handled them slightly differently from other body parts. In the main composition I 'pre-composed' the two eyes together into a single composition. A composition can be seen as a group of layers and another 'nested' timeline. My entire ghost animation is held within a composition, I can nest other compositions within it. Compositions are useful for treating groups of layers as a single layer; in this example I pre-composed  the eyes so I could move that composition to animate and move both of the eyes at once in the main time-line as if they were a single layer. You can 'open up' compositions to edit their respective layers and effects. For the eyes I parented the group to the body and moved them around to make it look as if the ghost was looking at his surroundings. To add life to the character I animated a mask to move up and down over the eyes to make them blink.

 

This is what the all of the key-frames over the time-line look like one I had finished animating the character. One of the goals was to create a looping character; this was quite easy. I copied and pasted the starting key-frames and pasted them as the end key-frames for each individual layer, this translates to a seamless loop when played back. To finish off the animation I converted all the key-frames to 'easy-ease' key-frames, this means that the animation will act like an arc rather than a straight line to subtlety make the animations more life like. As an example, the wing would start accelerating but slow down by the end of the animation rather than moving at a constant speed. Try straightening your arm by your side and bring it up to be horizontal across your shoulder as fast you can; the motion accelerated but slowed down to stop, it wasn't a consistent speed throughout the motion. I also added motion blur to the wings to make the animation seem more alive by enabling motion blur on those layers.




This is my animated character loop running at 12 frames per second. I really like this animation as it has a lot of charm, feels alive, isn't overly complex and is easy to understand. The flapping motion of the wings actually looks like it's keeping the ghost in the air and the character has a sense of 'weight' to it which is important for any character animation. I could improve this animation further by having a shadow underneath the ghost that would expand and contract and the ghost moved downwards and upwards to give it more depth. I dislike the blinking motion as it looks unnatural and awkward, if I were to do this again I would create additional closed-eye shapes to replace the eyes when needed.

There are other ways of animating characters in After Effects (such as using the puppet tool) but dividing up the character into several layers proved to be easiest; this method is useful when there aren't too many body parts and for when I need to create joints between body part however, this method can be harder to handle when there's more layers and compositions involved. Using the puppet tool gives an animatalbe 'mesh' to solid images which is useful for giving life to still images, but is more complex and unsuitable for this task.



herre's a comparrison between the digital and paper-scanned versions of the animation; it is easy to tell I tried to keep the new animation true to the original vision.