Responsive Collaboration: Animation Tests

I thought it would be a good idea to create some quick animation tests to see how the paper style animation would look like in After Effects. I quickly made up a scene in Photoshop, consisting of one of the barn designs - which I had tried altering the colour of to make it represent the company's logo - and some fields.

Changing the Colour

Test One - Plain

For the first test, I simply made the components into 3D layers and made up the scene in after effects. I then animated a simple camera pan to see how the scene could work. I quite like how 'clean' it looks, and definitely would be happy to stick to this simple style. If we were going to go ahead and make an animation in this style, I would obviously have to reconsider the size of the original layers as some of the grass layers look pixelated due to being re-sized. It might even be worth creating some vector layers in Illustrator so this issue can be avoided, especially for some of the easier shapes.

 

Test Two - Fractal Noise

The second test shows how the pan will look if Fractal Noise is applied to the composition. I'm still unsure about whether I prefer this added texture; I like that it feels more like paper, but not sure whether I'd chose this over the cleanness of the first test. I shall discuss this with Tyler when we next meet up.

Test Three - Lighting

Test Four - Radial Shadows

I revisited creating shadows using lights. Though I like how I can more easily control where the shadow appears, I don't like that it makes the composition dull in colour, though if I increase the intensity of the light, it begins to shine too brightly on the layers which looks even worse. So I tried a different way of creating the shadows. This time I looked at creating them using the Radial Shadow effect, and very much preferred these results. I was able to easily change the light source position, and the distance and properties of the shadows, but still retained the brightness of the original layers. I think if we go for any shadows, it should be in this way.