I had to begin with cutting out the butterfly from the original artwork that we had been given, this is so I can animate the butterfly away from the background.
The program I used was Photoshop, and the way I did it was to cut each of them out seperately, therefore I begin with one wing. I started with using the magic wand tool to select the right parts, I then transfered over so I was using the brush tool whilst the selected area was masked, this then allowed me to be very precise with what I was selecting.
The next step was to get out of the masked selection and have the normal selection, and when in the normal selection I then delete the background to just have the wing. The last thing I did was to make the artboard the same size as the wing.
I then repeated the same process with the other wing and the body as well, until I had each section saved seperately.
After cutting out the parts of the butterfly, I then imported them into Adobe After Effects where I would be able to manipulate them.
I first had to think about how I wanted to make the butterfly fly, and I couldn't really think of a good way, until I remembered I could use the puppet tool. The puppet tool, in After Effects, is where you can place tacs over parts of the wings or anything, and then you can manipulate the tacs that you want to, so I placed tacs all around both wing, and I made the outside ones move, as what a butterfly does.
However, doing that I found that my butterfly looked really weird and didn't look like a real butterfly at all, I therefore had to find another way to make my butterfly animate like a real butterfly.
I went onto the internet to see if there was any tutorials on how to animate a butterfly, and I found this link, which explained exactly how to animate a butterfly in the way that I originally wanted.
http://layersmagazine.com/animated-butterfly-in-after-effects.htmlThis technique showed me that I should used the 3D layer tool, which is situated in the layers section, I selected that for each of the layers of the butterfly, I then had the 2 wings be parented with the body. Parenting means that the objects that are being parented will do the same and the parent object, therefore if I move the body in any way the wings will move the same way as if they were each all together and not on 3 seperate layers.
After finding out how to make the wings flap like a normal butterfly I then had to make the butterfly move in the same way as a real butterfly, very twitchy and not in the same place for long. So using the position keyframes I made the butterfly move and twitch like a real butterfly would.
I then had to add the background and all of the different components that I would be having within my background. The way I created all of my different components was by using Illustrator. I had a look back into my sketchbook to see what designs I have come up with I then re-created them using illustrator, and due to the simplicity factor that I have always wanted to create it did not take me long to come up with the Illustrator designs.
The different components that I have to create are:
- Hedges
- Hills (front and back)
- Tents
- Signs (sandwich boards or billboards)
- Trees
- Sky (background)
- People (to populate the festival to make it look like it is buzzing)
- Stages (with lights, speakers etc)
- Performers
I then imported each of these components to After Effects, and I had to move each of them in different ways, to make it look like the butterfly was traveling through the hills towards the festival, and then traveling through the festival to see all of the different parts of the festival.
The way I achieved that was by using the keyframes for both the scale and the position sections of the layers. I had to move each part seperately, which made it quite difficult and time consuming, however when I finished I found that it looked really affective with the butterfly in place, and it made it look like the viewer was travelling around this 3 dimentional animated world with the butterfly and finding all of the different parts fo the festival and all of the wonders within it.
After creating this animation I felt very proud in what I had done, it was also a big learning curve into how long some things take to make, and how short some things take to make. For example I thought the animating the butterfly would take ages, and at first it did, until I found the easier way, which then became a very short period of time to make it.
The next learning curve I had found I made was that I should not stay with my first option and if something does not work then I should find an alternative. The part of this process I was talking about was making the butterfly animate and making it look like a real butterfly.
Lastly, I used Adobe Illustrator to create some of the graphics, and to modify some of the images to make them lighter or darker.
