Initial Clip Timelapse & Animation Insights

Hey guys,

I've already shared my animation for Initial Clip with you some weeks ago. Today I'd like to give you a deeper look behind the scenes, as it's been one of the most complex animations I ever made so far.

First of all, there's a full length replay of the drawing part. Then I attached the layered PSD file that I use for the After Effects animation, you can download it below.

The animation process

As usual, I created a mix of handmade frame-by-frame and keyframe animations in After Effects. The frame animation is one of the most repetitive and time consuming, but also very rewarding parts. One of the frame animations are those sparks and lights coming through the cables.

I start making these once every other part of the drawing is done, so I can practically draw the animation over the canvas. This makes it very crucial that the client signs off the previous process, so there will be no changes on the illustration afterwards. For the mentioned sparks and lights, I made XX frames, this is what it looks like in Procreate:

I export these parts as GIF animations and import them to After Effects. This is what the GIF looks like:

The smoke and the little reflections on the plants are made in the same way.

Organization & planning

One of the most tricky parts was the layer organization. The client wanted to be able to add different cars to the animation, so I needed to make sure that swapping the cars was easily possible, while still keeping a nice depth to the whole scene with overlapping parts. So I divided everything into areas that I basically animated separately:

This is what the layers look like in After Effects, basically separated in the same way (just looking more chaotic here 😅):

As you can see, planning ahead is very important for this kind of work. I try to not let the cold hard orga stuff interfere with the creative part of the process too much though. For these animations, I first come up with ideas (sometimes rational, sometimes wild and crazy), and once there's a creative concept, I try to find solutions on how to produce it. If anything is above my skill level or too time consuming to build, I'll find workarounds.

Hope you liked this little behind the scenes - cheers!
Stefan