Zoloft black line animation

It's a really cute commercial, isn't it?

Well besides the obvious (straight cel animation) You could use vector paint to create your line art, and then animate the vectors from keyframe to keyframe.

I did an animation way back when that had the same look, but at the time I didn't have anything like vector painting tools so I animated vector shapes with Softimage|3d, morphing between keyframes, and rendered the result in two passes, one for "ink" and the other for "paint." Combined the two in AE.

The result was very effective, and much faster to create and change than straight cel work. Either way, you're doing the same thing... creating vector line art, animating the vecor points and then stroking the vector lines.

You could use Trapcode's 3d stroke to ge tthe same sort of thing with a nice controllable "taper." You could even kick it up a notch (bam) with CE's "roughen edges" on the result to get a more rough, organic feel like a chineese brush painting.

I dug into vector paint a bit and have decided that, as a paint tool, it sucks. No luck on animating the strokes directly. Since I have owned and used discreet *paint for a long time (it's now integrated into combustion) I would have hoped for better.

I then took a look at work-arounds. You can draw a mask on a layer and use "stroke" to create a line, and animate the mask, but there are no tapering controls for stroke. Trapcode's 3d stroke has tapering control and can stroke a mask in the same manner, so that takes you a bit closer.

So I don't have any great answers for you. If I was tasked to recreate the zoloft look, I would use *paint, or softimage.

If I was denied those as tools, I would grab a trial copy of Flash (if you don't already own it,) the web-animation application.

It can do exactly what we've been talking about, and isn't too hard to get used to quickly. You can do the bulk of your animation there and export the rendered result to AE.