Animating...

The beginning of my animation is the gift box landing on the screen, this is in time to the thud of the music. I then used all the images I took of the gift wrap unwrapping and played them one after the other, I placed the bottle underneath to seem that that is in the present.



I then made the cork burst out of the bottle and used the particle tool to create bursts of liquid coming out and off of screen. This was very tedious indeed as I have never used the tool before and kept getting it wrong! After hours of playing around with it I finally figured it out and chose a preset particle rather than my drawn bubbles, I think this looks a lot better and almost looks like tissue paper, so it is in-keeping with the rest of the animation...


Originally for the snowflakes I wanted to create one long Illustrator file scattered with my paper snowflakes and pull this down over the screen in after effects to make moving snow. I then had real problems with this as the file was so large it wouldn't save, I ended up making the snowfall 3 times in Illustrator only for it to disappear when I tried saving it!


I then started on my 'write-on' text. I used the write-on effect in after effects to create this...

Here is my animation so far...




Originally that was all I had planned for my animation, but i am finding it boring and dull in parts, specifically where it is just snow fall. I have decided to:
1 - Add more snow, in various sizes.
2 - Create an almost magical scene under the snow, with pine cones and other Christmassy things such as holly and berries. The idea for this is that the snowflakes from the Babycham is almost magical and creates Christmas spirit.
3 - I want to create sparkles on the bottle and the lettering, I am not sure how to do this yet though!

For the pine cones etc I am going to use some stop motion again, I really like the unwrapping of the present and think it could work well using it again behind the snow. I took a series of photographs of pine cones, slowly building up with holly, cinnamon sticks and berries...

My next job was to start cutting all the images up in Photoshop. This took about 5 hours to finish!

I then went the same way as the giftwrapping with putting them into After Effects. I put them in just as the snow was getting thicker as if it was the snow that were making the m appear.

I then put another layer of snowflakes amongst the other ones, I made the flakes smaller and more of them, I think it looks a lot better now.

I also wanted to make the snowflakes build up at the bottom. I did this in Photoshop by adding snowflakes around the finished still and then slowly rising the layer up in After effects whilst it was snowing, obviously removing the still from the Photoshop file so it had a transparent background! ...


I was pretty puzzled about how I was going to create the twinkling stars, but then I thought of making the still stars in Photoshop, adding them into After Effects and changing the scale of them to make them seem like they are sparkling! It worked pretty well! ...