Final Project

After weeks of hard work here it is my After Effects project.


Cat Fancy from Caitlin Lundin on Vimeo.

I'm very pleased with my project. I had fun with it and have always wanted to do an animated piece with construction paper. When I first put the animation together it was 30 seconds long and was far too rushed. That has always been a problem of mine, but I was able to slow it down to give each section the time it deserves. It was hard work for me to figure out the best timing, but overall I'm pleased. There are places that may benefit from a little more time of them but it was a tough call for me. I had some trouble with making movements look natural. There are some parts where the cat moves his head and it looks like something is just moving from one keypoint to the other. The are some things that I like like the wagging of his tail and the turning of his head and eyes. I'm glad I completed the project the way that I did. Definitely learned alot.

Final Stages

Construction Paper pieces were separated on to individual Photoshop layers so that they could be animated individually in After Effects.

Other than the common keys for things like position, scale and rotation I did a few other techniques. I made each piece 3-d so that I could use a camera to navigate in between the scenes. Parenting was also a technique that I used frequently in order to make the cat or other elements move together since everything was built on it's own layer but had to create one creature. I used puppet pins as well to create  fluid motion in the stiff paper parts that weren't suited for multiple layer construction.

Sound has to be added next which is one of my favorite parts because it gives the piece so much life. I'm going to look the the sound catalogue and get me some good sounds. I'll export the completed project from After Effects with no sound. From there, I'll take the .mov file into Final Cut Pro to add the layers of sound.

Progress on the Project

The story changed. I wasn't pleased with what I was able to come up with in the Amelia Bedilia like story. I moved to the dreams of a sleeping cat. It'll be a short piece but it will be a complete story which is what I want.

Having an incredibly busy end of semester, I have neglected the blog. This was the progress for November 20-26. I know that it is recommended to be in After Effects at this time, but planning these out and constructing them was a time commitment as well.

I cut out the pieces of construction paper and assembled them the to the amount of completion that I thought would work best in After Effects. For example I built the cat head separate from the body so that I could put them on different layers and animate them individually.

Here are the rough scans of the construction pieces. I'm really pleased with the look of the scans. It's cool to be able to see the grain of the paper and the shadow of the edge of the paper.

It was fun cutting these pieces out. Some of them had to have parts touched up in photoshop just to give it a little extra and have it stand out. I also cut out letters for the credits. 

Maya Motion

I created a quick scene with a ball. I added a key then moved the ball around adding more key frames to get the movement that I wanted. I added a lambert to the ball and put a color on it then set a key to the color and adjusted it so that the color would change with the movement.


Setting Keys on Maya from catlin lundeen on Vimeo.

After Effects Final Project

For my final project in after effects I was hoping to create an animation using construction paper to tell my story. I want to make a short 1-2 minute project telling a story about a cute animal and the things that that animal has to say about the world around it. I did a construction paper comic strip in French for a high school competition using jokes about idiomatic expressions. My life has clearly been affected by Amelia Bedelia http://www.harpercollinschildrens.com/kids/gamesandcontests/features/amelia/   I was thinking about doing something like that but with creatures. I'm not the most skilled at construction paper animals because their dimensions are a bit tricky but I'm thinking it'll definitely be some sort of creature. Once I have created the creatures and backdrops I would like to import them into After Effects on different layers so that I can animate the various pieces of the animation. The facial expressions will be animated as well.

Here is my estimated schedule

Week 1-
   Planning. Creating a vision for the creature and the world that he will interact with. The script should be written during this week.
Week 2-
   Creating. The script should be finalized and the creature and environments should be in the initial stages of construction. This will be very time consuming.
Week 3-
    Integrating. Finishing creation of the construction paper. Eat Thanksgiving Dinner. Begin taking the project into after effects and animating
Week 4-
    Animating. Completion of the interaction and animation of the construction paper creatures and worlds. And finally rendering.

This may seem like not very much time spent in after effects for an after effects project, but completing a construction paper animation has been a dream of mine and this is a great platform to complete it in. The weeks prior to week 4 will be completed with thought of how the creatures will be able to work in the after affects program. Also week 4 will be a very busy week as I will be devoting a lot of my time to completing the project. I will have more time to work on it then and will have thought a great deal about how to ring the animation together before then.

Motion Tracking in Maya

I took this short clip from Alias and exported it as a targa sequence so that I could use match movie and get a good motion capture on it. From there I took it into Maya. I created the two spheres and added the lightning effect to follow along with the motion tracking. Sydney Bristow is so fond of the Rambaldi Artifact that she found in Italy it really goes well with the stylings of her front hallway. That Rambaldi really could decorate.


Alias Lightning Motion Capture from Caitlin Lundin on Vimeo.

Green Screen Ben Bays Wizard Training

Ben Bays acted out the scene on a green screen. I took the video into After Effects and used a keylight to get rid of the green in the footage. From there, I added two foam emitters that were designated each with either the puppy or the heart. I attached the emitter to a location tracked on Ben Bay's hands. The cartoon look was an effect that I put on the footage with Ben Bays in it to add to the story. There's really no reason for it other than spicing it up a bit.


Ben Bays Wizard Training from catlin lundeen on Vimeo.