Fantasy Olympics Rationale + Animation!

For this project, my task was to produce a 30 second animation using Adobe After Effects, to promote a new, futuristic sport at a fantasy Olympic games. This firstly involved quite a bit of character and concept design, before gradually learning the skills needed to create my animation within the new software.


To start with, I came up with a few ideas for my animation’s concept, then chose to use the sport of uphill skiing, using rocket skis to make it more of a ‘futuristic sport’ as the brief asks. I then sketched out some design ideas for my penguin character, before merging aspects of a few of these ideas together to create my final character design.


To be able to use and animate my character in After Effects, I had to scan it in to Photoshop (as I find this easier to use than Illustrator) and separate the different parts of the character into different layers, so they could be animated separately. I also scanned in drawings I had produced of the different layers of my environment design (sky, mountains, snow, etc.) and edited them to fit the cartoon style of my character.


I then imported these aspects into After Effects as files and compositions and then placed them in 3D space in front of my main cameras. I also blurred the parts further away and very close to the camera to give an impression of depth of field. I also created a couple of particle effects – CC particle world and CC snow – which helped me create the fire coming from the rocket packs and a snow effect over the whole scene. Once all created and imported into my main composition, I followed my storyboard and animated my character, assets and cameras, before adding lights and sound before rendering for more effect.


Throughout this project, I found the concept of creating a 2D character in a sort of 3D environment or space quite hard to get my head around, which is why I ended up producing quite a flat, but layered background for my animation instead. I also found the software itself rather frustrating to use at first, until I got used to all of the toolbars and functions that I needed to produce my work.


I feel, to say how unconfident I was with this project as it progressed, that I have done quite well in producing a decent quality piece of animation with a piece of software that was totally new to me. I have found in this project that I find 2D animation much harder to make look effective, but do find it easier to produce character design in 2D than 3D so far. As far as the 3D pipeline goes within relation to this project, I still feel I would prefer to work in 3D and not particularly in the field of character animation. I also feel I would prefer to use software such as After Effects more for compositing and visual effects purposes rather than animation.