Documentary Week 5 - Testing the Animation Technique

We decided near the start of the project to go with a sort of illustrative painting that paints itself up kind of style of the animation, but I had been doing the tests on Photoshop by making a new layer every time I make a stroke and then creating a key frame animation. Petra tried this and was concerned about the fact that it meant there would be over a hundred layers in a file and not much leniency for alteration. We sat down and googled if there was an easier way to achieve this and found an After Effects tutorial that could simulate it without needing to make so many layers.

This is a test using the After Effects method we found

I later found an even more impressive After Effects tutorial that would allow a paint stain/splatter effect but lacking the Photoshop brushes I needed to create the assets, I started experimenting with some third party brushes. Dotty blew my mind by sharing some of her watercolour brushes with me that can actually be found on the Adobe website so I spent the rest of the day trying out every brush and noting down the favourites.

I was also concerned if we would be marked down for doing what essentially felt like limited animation but Dotty assured us it would be fine if it fits the style of the documentary, which it does.