The customer asked to animate ready-made vector illustrations. There are 10 scenes in total.
The requirements were as follows:
- The duration of the roller is 30 and 60 seconds strictly.
- Music without copyright.
- Animate according to the plot of the video.
- The video should have voice acting. voice acting was provided.
In short, a migrant comes to Russia. he is informed that, upon arrival, he must undergo a medical examination, submit documents to the personnel department.
Everything else remained at my discretion.
If you want to go straight to the final result:
And for the rest, read how I collected this video.
Transfer of illustrations
The longest part is the transfer of illustrations to Adobe After Effects and getting ready for animation is creating compositions, importing. I ran into one problem – the illustrations used textures that were very complex and because of them, the Adobe After Effects application began to slow down a lot.
Therefore, I had to save these textures in .png format on my own, as well as delete them in illustrations to speed up the process. This is what took me no less than a day. Even in the process of work, there were small textures on the characters and elements that I did not notice, I had to constantly return to this stage.
Preparing characters for animation
The next step, when everything was imported and transferred correctly, was the preparation of characters for rigging (relationships of parts of the body with each other). Ringing is needed to move the wrist, and the whole hand also moves. To do this, it was necessary to place the anchor points on the parts of the body in the correct way and connect the parts of the body together. And then, using the Duik Bassel plugin, rig rigs.
This process is very time-consuming and time-consuming, spent half a day on it.
Before the main animation, I decided to animate my eyes and eyebrows so that the character blinks every few seconds. This gives the character liveliness. Made animation and looped it.
Similar animations had to be made for all other characters.
Project animation
When everything was prepared, I took up animation. Most of the tasks were routine. I had to creatively attribute to the creation of an oncoming stream on the train, where I experimented with some effects and achieved the desired result.
By combining different effects in the same scene, I gave volume, including with the blur effect. Animated the train by position and added the effects of the law and inscriptions.
To move from the first scene with the train, I applied a sharp camera movement, connected two scenes. It turned out that the train was leaving the edge of the screen and the camera was also transferred there.
Peron animation
The next scene was more difficult because we had 3 characters in the frame. And character animation is a very difficult process. Our eye is so arranged that it reads body movements well. If the train can be animated as you please, then you always have to try with a person.
I was the first to animate a woman with a suitcase. As an example, I used a classic picture with an animation of a person:
Here I had to animate step by step 5 elements – 2 legs, 2 arms, as well as body position. And not only the position, but also the angle of rotation. Since the head is attached to the body, it did not have to be animated.
This is a very painstaking process where you need to be attentive to detail, and then return again and edit the animation until it is most similar to human.
I did the same with the second character – a woman in blue.
Now about the main character. The illustrator drew in such a way that the character is only worth it and you don’t need to do animations. Therefore, I decided to make the animation as the main character unfolds the map. And here it was necessary to use non-standard techniques.
In order to animate this, I created 8 anchor points (null objects) which became the tops of the parts of the map:
Four of them tied to one hand and four to the other. Now moving your hands, it turned out that the card was folding. In addition, at the moment of transition from one stage to another, and both scenes were located in the same location, only the camera was shifting, I had to animate the turn of the head. Such flat animations are not convenient to do and literally everything had to be drawn by frames.
After the character animations, I added an animation of the emerging text.
Animation of the polyclinic
In the scene where the main character stands at the polyclinic, it was not entirely clear to me, but what is there to animate? According to the plot, an inscription about the mandatory medical examination should appear.
Let’s start with the transition between scenes. I decided to make a match cut, make a transition to the main character. I combined the 2 scenes and made the transition through transparency so that the main character remained in the same position, but only the situation around changed:
The next step was to animate the arrival of an ambulance. To do this, he made a separate composition where he added the car, animated the wheels, stop signal and exhaust:
Added an animation of the pop-up inscription.
It remains to animate the main character. Here, again, the illustration is drawn so that the character is standing. Therefore, I added the movements of the hands, as well as the animation of the eyebrows and eyes. Added head movement:
Photo studio
In this episode, the main character sits on a chair and is photographed by a woman.
I decided to make an animation of the introduction – this is when the chair on the left and on the right is our hero, they meet in the center of the screen and the character sits on a chair. In addition, I added a softbox animation that descends from above, the appearance of a background, and then a girl would leave.
In the background there were various decorations – these are cubes. Therefore, I decided to animate them – I added the effect of appearance using scale, as well as slow movements and turns.
My idea in this scene is that the character sits down, an inscription appears about the need for a photograph and the girl presses the shutter, a flash occurs and a transition occurs through it.
Therefore, I animated the movement of the girl as she presses the shutter, a flash appears and through the white screen there is a transition to the next scene. And also added the sound of the shutter operation to make it easier to read.
Then the character and objects disappear.
Scene in front of the personnel department
Further, according to the plot, the character knocks on the door of the personnel department.
In this scene, I animated the appearance of a pointer to the frame department (a pink check mark), and also added a character’s knock. This scene should be short, so I didn’t add any additional animation elements.
It was only necessary to make the transition to the next scene and I decided to do it with the door opening animation. I animated so that the door opened and we moved to the next stage.
Human Resources Department
In the personnel department we have 2 characters – the main character and personnel officer. According to the plot, first 3 documents should appear – a passport, a migration card and a VHI. So I animate them:
At first, all three documents are together, dashed lines appear, which rotate and all documents diverge in different directions. Moreover, for each element, I also added the Wiggle effect so that they, as it were, hover to the air and make vibrations, and did not hang motionless.
All that was left was to animate the characters. I used the animation of cubes in the background from previous scenes.
I was the first to animate the main character. He goes to the table and holds out his documents. There was nothing complicated here.
Then an employee of the HR department. I animated how it takes out and prints on the document, added the print sound. It remained to draw the print itself. I animated the appearance through transparency and adjusted everything so that the print would appear after the woman touches the document.
I also added a few animations that add more life to the video. For example, after the printing spacer, the views of the personnel department and the protagonist meet and they look at each other. And also at the beginning of the scene, I added how, at a meeting, the worker nods her head, inviting the hero to come up and smile at him.
Final scene
The last scene is a coat of arms with a call to respect the laws of the Russian Federation. Here I added an animation of the appearance of two coats of arms – the Samara region and the Russian Federation, animation of the ribbon expansion and the appearance of the inscription. I made the background animation the same as in the previous scenes.
Final video
Now you can watch the result of this animated video.
I completed it in 3 full days.