Ten by Fotolia - Season 2 - Lydia baillergeau - San francisco - Tutorial

Hi, my name is Lydia Baillergeau and today I’m going to share with you my After-Effects file that I designed for the Fotolia TEN Collection. I’m a huge Adobe Illustrator fan. Illustrator is great because I can make multiple art boards and story board y entire animation from start to finish, while creating the vector assets I will animate. This process really helps me visualize and realize my entire animation from start to finish. I can see how color and the design elements will be used throughout and make sure things are visually consistent, and yet dynamic and fresh too. I wanted to create a small animation paying homage to the creative process and finding inspiration. It’s something I search for every day. Creativity and being inspired is a really magical thing to me, so I attempted to depict this feeling through bright colors, twinkling stars, glowing lights and ethereal imagery. A while ago, the creative team in my office came up with a concept for a “toast to the creative process”. We spent hours brainstorming how it felt to be searching for the right idea, and then our copy writer, Leah Shesky, took the pen to the paper to craft a beautiful toast. I decided it would be fun to create a little animation for a portion of it. Carte blanche is a really wonderful thing to have. This way you can define your own direction. You can really choose to follow what speaks to you, inspires and motivates you. It was refreshing to get to set my own guidelines for this creation. In animation I think it’s always important to have layers of animation. The secondary subtle animations add layers of depth and detail to keep things interesting for the viewer. Technically this involves a lot of pre-comping and stacking effects and adjustment layers. The Illustrator art brush is a very powerful tool for organic animations. You can take a vector illustration, like this fish from Fotolia, adjust it and make it an art brush. Then you can literally draw out a frame-by-frame animation that will have a lot of character. You can bring in all of those layers into After Effects and sequence them so that you have a natural feeling, organic animation. Having lines that go from thin to tick or light to dark really helps keep designs visually appealing and adds depth. For this I like to use the gradient on the stroke feature in Illustrator. Shape layers in After Effects are amazing for most automated animation. I use them a lot for secondary animations as well. Simply bringing my Illustrator files in, like the lightbulb, creating shapes from the vector layer and then automating the animation with shape layer properties. This file uses frame-by-frame animation and flash; lots of Illustrator vector graphics and a short 3D sequence made in Cinema 4D; using hand made elements with digital elements as a nice contrast. I edited the vector images I downloaded from Fotolia to help integrate them into my design. It’s a nice way to work because you can save some time and avoid having to draw everything out. I altered the vectors by changing their color and sometimes stroke. I broke images apart to make them animation-ready. To add an organic quality to the blank canvas scene, I incorporated a brush stroke to mask on typography. Using Alpha and Luma mattes in After Effects are a good way to utilize organic textures in your animation. I love exploring these for transitions. I wanted to try doing some frame-by-frame animation in flash to create the splashes out of the champagne glass in the end. I simply brought my After Effects file into flash and drew the splashes over it frame by frame. Finding a way to break apart a vector image and build it over frames is key in creating transitions. You want to think about how you zoom in or out of something. Use color, scale, and motion to help create natural transitions. For the light bulb scene, I used cc light rays on a composition to help make the dissolve to the next scene more dynamic. Layer effects to keep them from looking default. Hey! Thanks so much for watching my tutorial. You can find all my assets on the Fotolia TEN website.