Since I have lost the after effects files we worked on with Brett, I decided to try and composite an animation into a filmed environment. Not having time to make a model, I found a website that hosts rigged Pokemon characters ripped from the 3Ds games, and decided to use Talonflame to make a video in a similar style to the Pokemon GO trailer.
The idea was to have animated him to land on my balcony, so I looked up some animation reference of hawks, the animal Talonflame is based on.
This helped a lot, but I still feel my animation is pretty stiff! I found it really hard to guess how the landing should look and also folding the wings. (which the rigging really wasn’t suited to doing)
I had to learn a lot of things to make the animation look at least somewhat believable in the scene. My footage was really shaky, so I did a little research and learned of the warp stabilizer, which worked really well, but the camera still moved enough that I had to learn how to track movement and apply that to layers as well, which I did by applying the movement tacker to a null object and then parenting that to any layers that needed to follow the movement of the camera.
I made a track matte mask on a shape layer to make sure Talonflame didn’t pass over the top of the railings, but encountered a problem when he landed to them, as his toes needed to be visible. I worked around this by making a small white shape on the luma track matte layer and keyframed it to move down as he lands.
I also applied a grain effect to the talonflame animation to make it fit better with my low quality camera footage. Along with this, I made him lighter when he is furthest away and had it blend to his normal colors, then to darker colors as he flew under the roof. To finish off I added a small shadow where he lands on the railings and added his cry to where he opens his mouth.
I don’t think the finished product is very believable and there is still a lot of mistakes, but I’m still pretty happy with it being my first independent project in after effects.
CAYEL 