Re: Kissies.se Animating a face

Hi!

I would like to share a piece of animation I did last week and hopefully give something back to this community.

The video can be seen here:
http://vimeo.com/4108906
Background: It is a remix of the swedish teen blogger Kissies.se's videoblog, for those of you who aren't that familiar with either her or the swedish language she is talking about her messy room. (!)


More or less everything is done right inside After Effects. And that is what I would like to share with you:

- The overall face shape is just a ellipse with a big liquify effect transforming back and forth over time.
- The mouth is a simple shape with mirror applied to it to create the lips. Then puppet tool on each side and in the middle. Then I used sound keys to isolate the audio to specific values and applied it to the middle puppet tool for the movement. At first I was thrilled with this technique working, but it later needed some manual fine tuning.
- The hair is created by a simple path with repeater applied to it. Then some wave and/or wiggle for the random motions. I also did 2 copies of each path without the repeater for improving the overall feel of individual hair.
- The eyes are just basic after effects circles. I did the movement with motion sketch. And animated the eye lids closing and opening.
- The eye lashes are actually a number of parenthesis's with a text to path-effect applied to it. I then animated it to sync the eyelids.
- And the eyebrows are once again a path with puppet tool applied to it. I did a couple of expressions and animated them with hold keyframes.

Next. The whole thing is parented to the overall face shape to wich I did a simple wiggle-expression in x and y-rotation for fakeing some kind of tracked motion. I then did a rough track of her movement by hand.

I hope this gives someone some new ideas on how to use the built in graphic tools inside of AE! It's nothing too fancy I know, but hey!


And, let's conclude this with a question:
Do anybody have a trick for randomly looping a set of keyframes inside a precomp? It would be great to just do one eyelid-animation and then randomly repeat that throughout the whole movie.

Take care now people!
/Martin