Using After Effects To Distort My Character Animation

Recently Steve showed the class how to scan in and 'clean up' our scanned drawings for our Character Animation we did a few weeks ago; these would in turn become the frames of the animation we would go on to use to project against walls in a later task. This cleaning up process would be done in photoshop to made the pen lines thicker and to get rid of the background from the paper. I went into a panic when steve was showing us how to do this because I could not apply these techniques; I was too far ahead compared to what people in my class had done and had actually put myself at a disadvantage.

The ultimate goal of this character exercise was to take the animation and use After Effects to 'project' it against photographs of walls around the college in a similar fashion to the animation 'Muto' by Blu. I went back to my ghost animation and analysed it, I concluded that it looks far too smooth and vector like to be used for such an application. I had a predicament: should I re-use the scans I originally did or capitalise on the work I've already done digitally? I have a philosophy when it comes to video work, I believe any information available can be manipulated in any way to achieve any visual look desired. With this in mind I decided I would go back to my digital animation and see what I could do to make it look more natural and hand-drawn.

This is the 'Muto' Animation, a look I will try to aim towards

This is my digital animation I am using as a reference for the process below

I opened up my animation in After Effects and started by reducing the number of frames of the animation; mine currently has 50-60 frames throughout its duration which is great for giving smooth motion but poor for replicating a drawn feel. I reduced the number of frames by changing the composition frame rate from 12 to 6. Next I disabled the motion blur as stop-motion animations don't have this visual atheistic unless added in artificially. There is slight hints of colour in the animation  which I didn't want so I applied a 'fill' effect to each coloured layer to make it a solid colour.

At this point the animation has the properties of a stop-motion animation but the illustration is still smooth and un-convincing. I thought about this and decided I would use the distortion effects in the program and animate them over time to make the animation jiggle, expand and contract in a way that made it look as if it had been drawn. I was able to achieve the following effect after using and refining various distortion effects:


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I am satisfied with how the effect turned out and I believe using this distorted animation will be more appropriate when I interoperate the animation onto a photograph.