I used Illustrator first to quickly design my Paddington Bear, creating every part of the bear on a different layer, so that when I transferred it over to After Effects it would be easy to animate the different sections of my character.
This is my Paddington Bear character that I created using Illustrator.
Once I'd finished drawing Paddington, I opened up After Effects creating a composition with a width of 1920px and a height of 1080px. Then I imported my little bear over retaining all layer sizes to allow me to animate them separately. I then decided which part of him I wanted to animate, coming to the conclusion that I only wanted his hat and his two hands to move.
Before I could start properly animating, I had to sort out my "Parent" layers. So to make sure the hat stayed near the head, I attached the hat layer to the head layer etc.. Once I had sorted all that out I went on to making my characters hat and hands "wriggle"
When coding in the wriggler effect, you open the layer you want to use i.e. the hat or the hand layers. Then, while holding down the ALT key, click on the specific transition clock you want (personally I wanted to use "rotation" or "position") and then you type "wriggle(5,10)", for example. The first number in the brackets represents the frequency and the last number represents the magnitude of the movement you're about to create.
After I had added the wriggler effect to how I wanted it to look on each of the layers, that was my animation done. However, to make my Paddington look a little more interesting, I added a texture into his coat.
This is the image that I used to create the texture on Paddington's coat.
Then finally to make my animation look even more visual, i decided I wanted to add a background. After realising that the texture on his coat made him look like he was about to go to a disco, I did a quick google search for disco backgrounds.
I think this background ties my whole animation together and I'm rather proud of my outcome from today's After Effects tutorial.
