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ANIMATE SEQUENCES

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In the super-saturated market of commercial illustration, how do you make your work stand out from therest? Its essential that you develop original and eye-catching techniques, says Chris Roth. So try this

Whether you work with paint, pencilsor just plain old pixels, adding a senseof motion to your illustrations will ensure

your work gets noticed and open you up to

many more exciting markets.Over the next few pages, Ill show you

how I went about creating the cover art for

One True Things Finallyalbum cover,

using a mixture of old and new techniques

and Adobe After Effectsto create a short

animated sequence for broadcast. You can

apply these basic methods to just about any

static illustration, photo or design piece you

like. Even if you consider yourself more of

a motion graphics designer than anillustrator, you could just as easily employ

these techniques on other raw materials.

The most important and time-consuming

step here is the file preparation doing this

properly will govern the outcome of your

piece. Each moving element must be

separated and placed on its own Photoshop

layer. This can be a lot of work if youre

getting most of your imagery from a single

static image, because once an element is

separated theres usually a hole to befilled underneath. Careful Rubberstamping

can usually patch these areas. If you are the

artist responsible for your imagery, you can

plan ahead as I do, render all your elements

separately and put them back together later.

Note that the Photoshopfile I prepared is

quite large. Even on my beefed-up G5, this

20-second sequence took nearly five hours

to render. If this proves a problem with

your system, you can easily experimentwith reduced versions of the starter files,

provided on the cover CD.

Illustration and tutorial by Chris Roth

www.chrisroth.net

DOWNLOAD

TIME LENGTH

6 hours

INFO

1As with all work of thiskind, its worth spending

time planning out your

sequence in storyboard formbefore you start. Its at thisstage that you can determinewhich camera shots, charactermovements and time frameswill be most effective.

Chris Roth,an LA native,graduated

from Parsons School ofDesign in NYC and nowresides in an oldconverted firehouse inBrooklyn. Roth hascreated luscious imageryfor books, magazines,album covers, apparel,television, and more.To see more of his work,visit www.chrisroth.net.

ftp://ftp.futurenet.co.uk/pub/arts/zinio/ca108_animate.zip

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5To bring the Octopus to life, we need to move her eyes. On a new layer, create the pupilsusing the circle Marquee tool. Use the same tool with the Rubber Stamp to create both ahalf-lid layer and a fully shut lid layer. Select the circular eyeball area and add pink gradientsfrom elsewhere with the Rubber Stamp. Add a little lash with the Paintbrush.

For me, there arecertain shortcut keysthat are absolutelyessential to the wayI work in After Effects.By using the mainlayer transformerslisted below, you cansignificantly cut thetime you spendswitching betweenlayers as you work: P Position S Scale R Rotation T Opacity

E EffectsThese shortcuts willhelp you deal moreefficiently with a rangeof layer attributes.

SHORTCUTS

4The rays, stars and sparkle elements, including the four-point star shapes and basicsun burst ray shape, can easily be created in Illustratorusing vectors, then importedinto Photoshop with the help of Copy and Paste. Well apply crucial blur and opacityadjustments later on using After Effects. I prepared this Ray Wheel in Illustrator, andapplied controlled blurs in Photoshop. Youll find Raywheel.psd provided on the CD.

3

Once the pieces are dry, scan them at avery high resolution. This sequence will

start very close up on the Octopuss face, sohigh-res files here are essential. Now maskeach piece out and place them all in a multi-layeredPhotoshop document. Alternatively,open snowset.psd, provided on the cover CD.

2First, the raw elements. The snowy hilland magic octopus were sketched outand painted using oil paints on birch wood

panels, pre-sealed with Golden Matte

Medium. As youll be separating these

elements inPhotoshop later, paint a black

layer around each one for easy masking.

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7By using the Paintbrush in Mask mode,you can tint selective areas of landscapeto enhance the colour scheme. Add a tealtint to the distant hills and some upper glowto the house and trees below the MagicOctopus. Finally, use the Paintbrush tool toadd a subtle horizon glow behind the snowyhill, and a glow puff behind the Octopus.

8Create a text layer, rasterize it, and give it

a little Edit>FreeTransform tweak. Atthis stage, I used a Wacom tablet to create asilhouetted snowy hill foreground layer with aslight emboss. This layer will eventually beFast Blurred in After Effectsto enhance the3D feel of the finished animation.

9Create a new project in After Effectsand import the snowset.psd file. In the Importwindow, be sure to set Import as Composition without cropped layers. Now choose

Composition>CompositionSettings and set the comp length to 20 seconds.

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6The mans arms should wave slowly. Toprepare for this, separate them carefully,place them on two new, separate layers andname them leftarm and rightarm.

10Before you start any key framing, all of the virtual pieces must be assigned to theircorrect parents. All the blink, sparkle and ray layers should be parented by theOctopus layer. This will allow for any physical changes to the Octopus to affect all of hermoving parts, too. Leftarm and rightarm are parented by the Snowhill layer.

Duplicate layer(Apple+D) is myabsolutely favouritecommand inPhotoshop! This simplestep is the essentialkey to beefing upalmost anything in

Adobes image-editingapp. Just apply youreffects to a duplicatelayer and fool aroundwith the transfer modeuntil youre happy withthe results.

BEEF IT UP

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15Set the Rays layer to spin slowly with two simple rotation key frames at the start andend of the timeline. Play around until youre happy with the rotation speed (I used a90-degree rotation of 20 seconds for my piece). Fade the Opacity and Duplicate the Ray layer,Fast Blurring one of the clones and changing it to an Add Transfer Mode.

13You can nowstart work onthe Octopuss eyes.Animate the pupilslayer with simpleposition key frames.Use fast, erraticmoves and mix themwith slow glances and

pauses to create arange of expressions.

14A single blink can be created using a succession of quick layer opacity changes usually one frame apart from each other ie, Open>half>closed>half>openThis key frame cluster can easily be copied and pasted sporadically as desired.

12The Sparkle layer can be used morethan once. Once its scaled and placedat a jewel location, set it to spin slowly with

just two anchor points at the beginning andend of the Timeline. Set the end anchor pointat two rotations, fade its opacity and apply aquick blur. Duplicate the layer and place itwherever sparkle is needed. The Octopus isthe Parent for all these sparkle layers they will go wherever she goes.

11All scale attributes, rotations, andpositions are calculated in relation toa layers anchor point. Repositioning themlater can cause changes with other key-framed motions. The layers eventualpurpose will govern the position of its AnchorPoint: spin axis, hinge, or zoom vanishingpoint. Centre the anchor points to the axis of

the Rays and Sparkle layers and place theanchor points at the shoulder joint area ofleftarm and rightarm.

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When youre addingany curves andmanipulating yourkeyframe velocities inAfter Effects, gettingthe movement youcreate to look naturalcan be a real challenge.The key to gracefulmovement is to alwaysuse as few anchor

points as possible.If you add too many,the situation willsoon becomeunmanageable.

KEYFRAMING TIPS

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19Add curves to the keyframe velocitiesby pulling down the triangle near thePosition label in the Timeline. A graph willshow the travel velocity of the Snowset layer.Click and highlight a keyframe and use thehandles to manipulate the velocity curve.Add another position keyframe midwaythrough the sequence by dragging theSnowset into position.

18Adjust the scale and position of theSnowset layer, matching the desiredstoryboard ending. Keyframe the Scale andPosition at the timeline end, then jump backto the timeline start. Zoom in and repositionthe Snowset layer so the Octopus fills theframe. The movement will look mechanicaland may not stay on screen properly.

16You can now animate the mans armsusing Rotation Key Frames. If thearm layers anchor points have been setcorrectly, the movements should lookpretty convincing. For a slow, naturalwave, rotation velocity curves must bemanipulated to ensure a slight accelerationand deceleration of the arms. See Step 19for more on motion curves.

17Create a new composition at anoutput resolution of 720x540 pixels,29.97 fps and 20 seconds long, and name itComp 2. Drag the Snowset Comp into theComp 2 window and set the anchor pointagain. For the camera movement to zoomout from the Octopus, position the keyframein the centre of the creature, thus setting theSnowset Comps scale vanishing point.

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20Now you have a better idea of whatthe virtual camera POV is seeing, youcan enhance the 3D effect of the Foregroundand Octopus layer by shrinking the Octopusas the animation progresses and lifting theForeground Hill layer slightly. The paceof these adjustments must coincide, sovelocity curves and a little Fast Blur on theForeground Hill will be required.

21What comes next is entirely up to you and your imagination. You could select some

music or apply some hand-written text, as Ive done. I also added a little snow usingDeliriums wonderful Snowstorm plug-in (www.digieffects.com). You can see the finishedversion of this animation project at www.chrisroth.net/octopus.

There really is nothingworse than spendinghours finessing amillion anchor points,only to unexpectedlylose them and haveto do it all over again.

Whatever the reasonfor the slip-up, thelesson is clear: save,save then save again,just to make sure!

SAVE! SAVE! SAVE!