After Effects

So after I made all my assets and exported them as individual pngs (because the files were huge and would have taken ages to load into AE) i finally opened After Affects (AE). Pretty much after that once I got started I decided that I loved AE. I had so much fun making things move (although I'm conscious that  lot of my movements are very simple and I've only really used the basic tools in AE so far.) I didnt start with the beginning of my animation- I jumped right in to try and make my hamster move since it was the most complicated element within my animation.

The first tool I tried to use to make my hamster move was the puppet tool, I saved out all the legs as individual images that were separate from the body and had a go at using the Puppet tool to generate the movement.

However I quickly found that although the puppet tool was really cool it didn't really work very well with my legs- I think because I need to segment the legs even more so the joints were separate images and could move without twisting the image- which kept happening when I pulled the points too far.

As well as this as much as I was willing to try and make this movement work, I suddenly thought that perhaps the movement was too smooth and not in keeping enough with my paper cutout hand-drawn style.

So after deciding not to use the puppet tool I opted to create the hamster movement through the use of 2 images which was my initial plan before going into AE. I added a drop shadow to my hamster scene in AE to try and cement this handmade cutout paper style. This movement was jerky and slow but I think it actually works much better with my visual style. I made the hamster movement into its own composition and then I opted to start my project from the beginning scenes.