Welcome to my next installment of my Motion Comics series. This time, I'm focusing on Adobe After Effects!
I will show you how I animated comic art with material taken from the public domain Golden Age comics.
You can see Part 1 of my Motion Comics series to see where the art came from and how I extracted it/prepared it for animation.
Part 2 used Adobe Character Animator (a function of After Effects) to use motion capture technology in order to voiceover and animate a character with our heads.
Adobe After Effects is a powerful program that offers many options and features. After Effects allows you to manipulate footage, still images, graphics like jpgs, Illustrator shapes, words, as well as sound. After Effects allows you to combine these elements into "Compositions". You can nest a composition within another composition or create a sequence of compositions just like other video editors such as premiere and iMovie.
Although After Effects may seem complicated, many of the basic elements such as layers, transformations and opacity, as well as pixel dimensions, are not that different from Adobe Photoshop. The added element of time means that a transformation can be performed over a time period. This is the essence of motion pictures. Jake Bartlett, who has many classes on After Effects, is a great resource for anyone new to the program.
