Character Animation in After Effects Workflow ｜ Animating Great Artists ｜ William Nghiem)

William Nghiem is an illustrator and designer in Sydney. His work has inspired me for years and I think he is one of the most underrated artists. His work is stunning. He gave me this beautifully layered photoshop portrait of the hound from Game of Thrones demanding some chicken and I imported this file straight into After Effects because William has so kindly separated each element onto a new layer. After importing I parented the hair and the facial features to the head, then parented the head and the armor to the body and then I roughly blocked in the sequence with a few position keyframes and just swapped out the different mouth options to get the expressions and timing right. When you're first doing the blocking just think about it as the bare minimum of animation to get the story across. I'm not worried about specific details of how things bounce and move and react to each other. I'm just focused on the overall timing to get the story across. After the blocking is done we move on to refining the primary animation. In this case it was the I focused primarily on getting the easing correct for these movements. This little bounce at the beginning where he pops up, I'm going to select those keyframes and jump into the graph editor and then I'm going to separate the x and y position values by clicking down here. Because we're only dealing with an up and down animation, nothing side to side, just focusing on the y position is going to make this a lot clearer. So I'm going to delete the x position keyframes, select the y ones and then go back into the graph editor. Here I'm going to select them and add some easing by clicking this easy ease button down here which will add these bezier handles and let's fit all graphs to view. I want him to fall fast at the start so I'm going to move this handle up here and from here there's a lot of fiddling and adjusting to get this bounce right. He needs to fall fast, bounce up a little and then settle into his final position. Once I was happy with it I applied that same process to him being struck by the chicken. I added some more expression to his face by creating this closed eye shape and switching from an open eye to a closed eye when he gets hit by the chicken and at the start when he falls down and raises up. I switched between the two of them by creating some keyframes on the opacity property at 0 and 100% and turn them into hold keyframes by right clicking and selecting toggle hold keyframes which means they will hold their value until the next keyframe so there's no in-betweens. They're either on or they're off and I applied the same ones to the open eye layers but in reverse so when the eye is closed for 100% the eye is open for 0%. So as long as these keyframes line up there will never be an overlap of two eyes visible on screen at the same time. I also paired this with an eyebrow movement that just moves downward in position when the eyes closes and then up when that opens. I also recreated this open mouth shape using shape layers, one for the mouth and then this one for the teeth and then used the set matte effect to limit its visibility to the open mouth while I animated its path properties to open slightly. I much prefer to recreate assets with shape layers than animating their paths rather than using puppet pins or mesh warps on raster elements because I find those a bit too limiting and unpredictable even if they can be quicker and easier. At the end here I animated the head moving up slightly as he smiles in delight as the chicken is raining down as if raising it in triumph. When I first did this I moved the head a little too high but then I thought you know what it's actually pretty funny and unexpected that his head would just fly off like that stretching his neck out and little moments like that are what I love about animation. Something completely unrealistic and exaggerated that are just fun and dumb. So I ran with it, I upgraded him to an extended neck and drew some extensions to his hair with shape layers. After I was happy with this refined primary animation I moved on to the secondary animation. Here I animated the elements to move in addition to the primary movement, like his hair flopping and his armor moving in reaction to his bounce being hit by the chicken. My method for doing this is to find the property you're animating, here we'll do the rotation of the sword, and find the property that it'll be reacting to, in this case the y position of the body as it bounces down. And like when a car suddenly breaks and everything inside it will continue to move forward because it still has that forward momentum, our sword is going to continue to move and rotate even as his body is finished bouncing. So using these four y position keyframes as a guide I'm going to open rotation property on my sword with r and add keyframes to all of the same positions on my timeline, and from there adjust the rotation of the sword in the way that it should react. Here when the body is at its lowest there will still be some momentum pulling the sword down, so let's drag our rotation over slightly so it leans forward more than the body, and then as he rises up our sword will overshoot a bit and rise up a little bit higher than it was before, and then settle into its final position that we've already keyframed. I'm going to use the very handy plugin called Ease Copy to copy these keyframes from the body and apply them to the sword. So I'm going to select these keyframes, select copy, select the keyframes on our sword, and click paste. This plugin is completely free, it means that we don't have to go into our graph editor and try to match the easings of the y position of our body exactly. Now we've got our sword reacting, that looks pretty good, but because this motion will be slightly delayed we can select these keyframes and just drag them over one frame. We could do two if you like, and that'll just give a bit more of a realistic motion. Then we move on to the final details. In this final pass I added this squashed beard shape here, added some roughening edges to the shape layers to match William's illustration with a rough photoshop brush, and then added some extra wave warping to the hair here at the end. For any smears or moments where there's an element really distorted, I find it's easiest to just redraw it with the shape layer. It's normally only a few frames and requires very little animation. So for this squashed beard for these few frames, I just drew this blob with the shape layer and parented it to this top armor layer. It doesn't have to be super realistic or detailed, because we've taken the time to get the movement and the anticipation right on the head where it easing and pushes down, we know that it's the head being squashed, so we don't have to do much more to sell that animation. And to get this paint texture here, I just stole this layer from the existing beard layer and then applied it to an alpha matte to this blob shape. And because I'd recreated a few elements with shape layers, a lot of the animation had these really smooth lines, like this back right hair here. So to get them to match the roughness of the photoshop brush that William had used, I added the roughen edges effect. I changed the scale down pretty low to 11 and the complexity to 3, but really I just played around with these settings until I got something that would match it approximately. I feel like it was in the same design language of the rest of the illustration was in. There's also a cheeky wave warp effect on all the hair at the end here. For these shape layers that I used to extend out his hair, the first thing I did was to animate the path of this hair property here. So it goes from being wavy on the right here to a few frames later being straight. Then I added the wave warp effect and during that same process with those keyframes, I animated its amount going from 0 to 30. So it goes from a static wave shape to a straight edge shape that's animating in a wave. And this all happens while the head's making a little bobbing motion, so that movement masks that transition fairly well. Animating in stages like this with blocking, primary motion, secondary motion and details is important because it can get messy if you don't have a structured workflow or process. In this final details comp, you can see I've got a lot and a lot of keyframes all reacting to each other. And looking at it now, it looks like it's a bit messy, but everything is really reacting to something that was animated beforehand. In a waterfall process, step after step. And although we all just want to dive in and animate our favorite section first, having the structure helps keep the project on track and makes the process much smoother. Here's a short playlist of me animating the works of some other great artists and illustrators that I think you'll enjoy if you've made it this far. I'll see you in the next video and please consider subscribing if you like this video and you'd like to see more every week.