Fantasy Olympics Rational

The second project in this term is to design a promotional advert for a fantasy Olympic bid, we had to create our character, sport,environment all in 2D but using Adobe After Effects to animate a 30 second 3D animation . This is my first time to work with After Effects software.

At the beginning of the project, when I read the brief there are several ideas came out, I've chosen the hurdle race as the Olympic sport, then I sketched those design ideas. To using a dog for my character in the project, I thought dogs are human's best friends, and we are quite familiar that lots of designers are using dogs in their animations. After completed the character design, I scanned those sketches into my computer, then using Photoshop to separate the character in different layers. I also made the environment scene in the same process. All the things are ready, I started import them to After Effects.

Before watch the tutorial, I have no confidence in this software. It is a little bit like a software that combination of Flash and Premiere. So I decided to work with the tutorial step by step.The tutorial is really helpful, puppet tool is amazing which brings me a lot continence in controlling the character action. I have found that I still got some problems in this project, the most serious one is background, I've failed in creating the 3d environment space, so I only keep it in the flat view.

Throughout the project, I feel that I have done quite well in creating the character expression and action parts, but created a 2D animation is much harder than 3D one, especially in the environment part. I have to say I really enjoyed in doing this project it gave me a chance to learn new software and explore further into actual animation side of the program.