As there is not a great deal I can animate without Tyler's finished character components, I thought it would be best to make a start on the scenes that don't require characters, and the first scene that came to mind was the planting of the beans. To get started, I drew the hole in Photoshop - which I had to go back and redraw at a larger size as it was too pixelated when I zoomed in on it in After Effects - and then imported this, and the beans that Tyler had provided, into the project I had made previously for the beanstalk scene.
Animating the beans was rather straight-forward as it is something that I have tackled before, but it was getting them to appear as though they were landing in the hole that was the issue. I couldn't bring the hole forward as the beans would disappear behind it, and if I brought the grass forward the hole would no longer be visible at all. I figured the best solution would be to mask the beans so that they sat nicely in the hole. This worked well, but I wanted to see whether there would be a quick way of masking the beans, rather than having to adjust the mask path for every frame. The closest I got to not having to do this was creating a tracking matte but the issue with masking in this way meant that the bean's colour and opacity was altered, which is not what I wanted. So in the end I had to animate frame by frame, but I found that if I alt-clicked the mask I had drawn I could move the whole mask rather than individual points, which meant I could simple rotate and move the mask so it lined up perfectly with the hole every time.
Alt-Clicked Mask
The next thing I addressed was the texture of the beanstalk. In our last meeting it was suggested to us that the beanstalk might look better if the grain of the leaf texture was vertical rather than horizontal, to help create the illusion that it was growing upwards. This was a quick fix and I very much agree with this feedback as I definitely prefer how it looks. I also adjusted the levels of the layers in After Effects as I could only do this frame by frame in Photoshop, in hopes that this would make the beanstalk stand out more from the green background, and I think there is a definite improvement.
My next step was to extend the beanstalk so that I could create a camera pan up it, leading to the A2 Milk Farm. I thought this would be a simple process, but I realised that enlarging the canvas size in the original Photoshop document, altered the size of the layers in the After Effects project, so I had to go back and re-position everything as I couldn't undo the save. This was a relatively large inconvenience but now I know to avoid doing this in the future, and to make new components in new files.
Progress With The Bean Scene
I'm really pleased with how far I have come today with this scene, and I don't think it's far off being finished. I think the camera movement could do with some easing in as it seems to move to fast too quickly, and the clouds could potentially do with some looking at, perhaps giving drop shadow to the odd one to give them more of a definitive shape.
When I showed Tyler he said that "it looked cool", so I'm taking that as a go-ahead to continue working in the way that I am, but when I next meet up with him I shall ask him his opinion on my ideas for improvement.
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