After Effects 2D Composition Project

"Scout taking it easy"



This was a simple 2D composition done in Adobe After Effects over the course of a few days, with the objective of learning After Effects' basic features. It contains a few animated sprites and moving background. I borrowed the graphics and sound from the popular PC videogame Team Fortress 2.

It features a Scout, from Team Fortress 2, hopping around and cheering. Then at the end of the animation, a Heavy appears and shoots at him.

The animation started in Photoshop CS2 where I structured a multi layer image with the background and the sprites. I made the background larger than the image field so I could scroll it as the Scout moved. I grabbed the Scout, Heavy and Backgrounds from various Team Fortress 2 Screenshots - I used the magic wand and magnetic Lasso in Photoshop CS2 to select them.

I created several layers; one containing the background, then I placed the sprites on new layers on top of it. I also created "mask" like layers in case I wanted the Scout to go behind certain areas, but they were not used in the end.



I then imported into After Effects. I imported it as cropped layers as otherwise the background would have been truncated.

After this the most important thing was to animate the scout. I just went with a simple 2 frame animation but as after effects does not have native support for sprite animation.

I create a new composition in the project and copied in two imags of the scout Scout, representing both frames of the animation. I cropped the work area using "Area of Interest" to make sure I didn't have a lot of unused space. In the timeline, I had one appear, then disappear, then the second appear, using alternating Keyframes. Looped, this worked as a classic frame by frame animation.



I brought this composition into my main composition; and went to "Enable Time Remapping" - Time remapping allows me to swap around the positions of the keyframes. Keyframes are usually intended to be mid points in a smooth transition, for example I could have a key frame of a ball in the air than another of it on the ground to have it drop; here I was just using them as traditional animation frames. I used this to alternate between the frames of the "Scout" sub-composition, thus creating the animation.



I continued this animation, forcing the frame in the time line to keep it looping. I had the scout jog about fairly random, I create several keyframes to capture the movement and moved him around, up down left and right. As you can see in the above image, there is a label called "Position" - I right clicked on this, and went "add keyframe". After Effects created the animation based on these keyframes that recorded the differnet positions. I could also create keyframes for things like size and orientation. You use the same method - right click on the label, and select add keyframe.

Then, I swapped out for another Scout actor, this one viewed head on. I removed the original Scout from the timeline at this position, and added in the new ones. I had him hop in the air slightly and cheer.

To get this effect I used the Puppet tool. I put "Puppet Pins" on his shoulders, upper arms, elbows, hands, head, mid torso, hips, thighs, knees and fet. I had him do a slight jumping animation then a little wave. This wasn't too hard to do especially as the Puppet tool automatically creates keyframes. However I would have liked to speed the animation up slightly and I didn't seem to be able to do this. Here you can see the Puppet Pins of the Scout, moving these around moves each area it's attached to dynamically:



I then had an image of the Heavy slide in from the side. I used a slight Puppet effect on his arm and head, to help make it look like he's taking aim with his gun. After that, I create an Adjustment Layer for effects from Layer -> New -> Adjustment layer - I used the "CC Light Rays" effect multiple times rapidly to create a kind of muzzle flash effect. For humorous effect I used a sound of the Heavy voicing his own gun sound. I also had his size increase and decrease as he laughed, I enlarged him on one keyframe and shrunk him on another.

I played around with the Puppet tool to make it look like the Scout was reacting to the shot, and had him pushed back by it.

I took a piece of music to use with this also, the start of in Fear of Fear by Bauhaus. There are several sounds in the image of the Scout and Heavy(as I mentioned above) - you can see how I placed them in the movie timeline here -



After all this, I exported the movie as Quicktime by going to Composition -> Add to Render Queue, and rendering the image. Initially, I was having trouble with skipping in the animation - I went to "Module" and clicked around until I found the option for the "Photo Jpeg" compression format, which was quicker. I also had to lower the quality significantly.

I then uploaded it to Youtube, finishing the project.