Getting to Work

I left Jess and Jake to get on with drawing all the element that I would then incorporate into motion graphics. They were pretty fast to draw everything and it came out looking great so, then I could get to work. 

I started off by creating a composition. I decided upon a frame rate of 24fps as that is the standard for film and works well on the internet, which is where the video will be predominantly viewed. I wanted as slow a frame rate as possible too because that would lend itself to the feeling of stop motion animation which is pretty similar in style and feeling to how I am envisioning this animation ending up looking and feeling like.

Once that was done I placed the assets in. Before any of this however, I decided upon a concept and ran it by the group. They all liked it. The concept was to start off on the astronauts pupil then zoom out to reveal him in space. Then keep zooming to reveal the space being in a jar on a shelf. To do this I originally tried scaling all the layers at different speeds in a 2D environment but I quickly discovered it was far too complicated and difficult. So with that I decided to step into After Effect's 3D environment (something I have rarely done). And it worked brilliantly.

I created a standard camera and then positioned my layers at different points in Z space. Z Space is the axis that created the 3rd dimension. It is forwards and backwards, towards and from the viewer. By positioning my layers closer and further away from the camera, I could create parallax and have object fly into view. Here are how I laid them out:

All the layers at different points in Z space not visible within the comp yet:

A top view on the left to show all the different positions of all the layers:

A view of the start of the animation (left is a view from the left in space and right is whats visible in the comp viewer):

A view of the end of the animation (left is a view from the left in space and right is whats visible in the comp viewer):

The pink selected object in the above screenshots is the camera and as you can see if flies backwards through Z space passing through various layers and objects. 

So once I got the camera move and timing down I just had to fill the jars, add motion blur and an ending title.