Creating the Promotional Video

I was very glad to receive the task of creating a short promotional film for the iPad magazine project. I had been meaning to make a similar thing to use as a Youtube trailer and I was glad to be able to finally create my idea.
I decided to demonstrate my 2D compositing skills by re-animating the short animated gifs I have on the website. The gifs consist of two simple characters that resemble the flat logo design, these characters are meant to symbolise the two members of Malmo House.

I had to re-animate the characters because the GIFs were too low in resolution. I also took this opportunity to redesign the characters. There isn't much of a physical difference, but I used groups and smart layers to make the characters much easier to animate. I also created a blink preset, so that all the blinking was identical, this helped to create a motif throughout the two characters.

The first sequence I planned and animated was the business card sequence. I masked off the top card and added it to a new layer, this was so I could place the characters behind them and make it appear that they are peering out from in between the cards. I chose not to use the arms in this sequence so i could emphasise the eyes and hopefully add some emotion to the characters through their eye movement, much like the Gromit character in Nick Park's Wallace & Gromit. 

The second sequence I animated was the waving on the laptop. This turned out to be my trickiest edit. I shot the footage of the laptop with the intention of reversing the footage in the edit. I chose to do this as the tilt I was using in the film seemed more natural the opposite way to how I had planned the animation. In retrospect, it would have been far easier to reverse the footage before tracking and animating, but I went into the edit expecting to reverse afterwards. This made it more difficult to track, and it took many attempts to get right, sometimes the null wouldnt respond the way i wanted it to so some additional keyframing was needed. After I tracked the footage and the null was behaving how I wanted it to, I simply parented the animation composition to the null and it sat nicely within the final composition. 

After, this I animated the camera sequence, this in itself lead to a few problems, the camera was not as shaky as I wanted it to be, I was trying to present a handheld feel whilst using a stabiliser, this footage wasn't shaky enough so I ran it through a destabiliser plug in for after effects and added some motion keyframes. When I was happy with the outcome I motion tracked which was a lot easier this time around. When animating the figures I chose to use easy ease for the actor's arm as he holds up the skull and for the cameraman's arm as he followed the movement. This created a more fluid and natural movement and allowed me to add a little bit of expression in the characters.

Finally I animated the microphone sequence. This added a new challenge as I wanted the characters to sit upon the interface box, this required me to track on a different plane, after a few goes I managed to select the correct plane and tracked successfully. So after i added the animation composition to the tracked plane, exported all the sequences, assembled them in Premiere, reversed the laptop shot and added the animated logo. This completed my animation, 2D composition and motion tracking demonstration in the channel trailer for Malmo House.