Applied Animation: Testing Ideas in After Effects

I thought it would be a good idea to put my new skills in After Effects to the test, and see whether this would be an appropriate programme to use for my animation. In particular I wanted to test the final scene, which is the title of the film. 

To get started, I created the components I was going to need in Photoshop. This included the text, the background and the aim sight. I wanted the overall look to mimic the style of the front cover of the book, so I worked in the three colours that were featured; red, white and black. Not only this but I wanted to keep the text and the general "grunge" aesthetic, so I experimented with different fonts and brushes to try to recreate a similar composition. 

Title Attempt - Comparing to Original Book Cover

Once I had created all the components, I exported them into After Effects and attempted animating them to see how it would look and whether it would work.

Attempt One

The idea behind the title is that it is going to appear after the camera has either zoomed into the bag on the girl's head or the light coming through the window, so I had the title fade in by changing the opacity of the layers. Once it had reached it's full opacity, I animated the aim sight lining up with the text, and after a couple of seconds had the video cut to black. This would be where the gun shot sound would play to end the sequence, and to transition into the start of the film. 

For a first attempt I think I did really well. I showed my animation to Matt and he seemed to approve, but suggested that I had the background animated rather than simply fade in. I thought this was a good point as it could potentially make the animation more interesting and visually pleasing. 

Attempt Two

Here I have tested out what the animation would look like with an animated background, which I had to redraw as I had already combined the background layers on my original Photoshop document, saved and closed. This time I kept the layers separate so I could animate them individually. I made the patterns splat/appear by creating a mask - something I had learned how to do in my AE tutorials - then readjusted the key frames to make them move at just the right speed. I think this has greatly improved my animation. It's a lot more aesthetically pleasing, and it feels as though there is more skill involved, when in reality it only took me about 20 minutes or so.

I think the style works for the kind of animation I am wanting to produce, and it was incredibly easy to use. I definitely think I should consider using After Effects when I come to animate, especially for some of the transitions I'm hoping to include as I think it will be much easier to animate using After Effects.