In the beginning of Second semester of our third year attending the animation and motion design course in January of 2021, we were given a new motion design project. Now at this point we had started having our classes be entirely taught online and thus staying at home, where I moved back to my village. So, when we were told that our new motion design project would involve making a parallax animation in aftereffects, I had a lot of material to work with seeing as I live in the countryside. I had an idea of what I wanted to do for the project and when I asked my instructor if it would be okay if I included some of figurines, he said yes, I then knew I wanted to make an epic slow motion action scene with my figurines. And after walking around my village taking multiple different shot of my figurines posing in front of a background that would work well for the parallax, and after sorting though said picture I finally decided on this one as seen below.
After deciding that this was the Picture I wanted to work with, the next part was to take the picture into photoshop and separate it into all it’s different elements, such as foreground (the table) the Midground (the grassy area up to the stone wall) and the background (the building in the far back). I also wanted to have the characters move ever so slightly in the scene so I had to separate them into different parts as well, such as their heads, arms and legs.
Once I finished separating the photo into all it’s different elements, I then followed a series of tutorials that my instructor had upload to vimeo about how to create a parallax in Aftereffects. He uploaded a new tutorial once every Friday, for about 6 weeks. Below is a picture of the aftereffects file itself. When it came to this project, I was really trying to replicate the tone of this official piece of artwork ,as seen below, from the comic book series "Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers" which these figurines were made for.
Below you will find the final result. Overall, I am very happy with this project, as someone who wasn't that familiar with after effects, I feel this project really helped my get more accustomed to it. The fact I also got to use my figurines in it did increase my investment in the project. I also found it was a nice break from all drawing, seeing as we were still working on other animation projects at the time. Once again, really happy with the final result.
