I'm going to show you how to use After Effects and a 2b pencil to create this animation
my plan was to create a short looping animation in After Effects and then
redraw every frame by hand to create a lot of charm and texture that
frame-by-frame animation tends to have and experiment with blending traditional
and digital animation to create maximum impact for the amount of work required I
decided that needed to loop and be animated at 12 frames per second so by
drawing just 12 frames I could create many seconds for the viewing I decided
on this design of an eye with an iris zooming in infinitely and lines rotating
inside that I started in a 5 second long comp that is 12 frames per second and
I've created a circle straight in the middle I'm gonna animate it scale by
making it 0 at the very beginning and then a few seconds later increasing its
scale so it encompasses the whole composition I'm gonna add some easing to
the very first keyframe and then in the graph editor just make that a little sharper
then I'm gonna duplicate that layer change its fill color to white and
then offset it by 6 frames which will be half about 12 second loop I'm going to
select and duplicate both of these with control D and then I'm going to drag
them over and offset them by 6 frames each again and keep doing that to fill up the comp
now we've got our infinite zoom
I'm gonna drag my work area to be 12 frames long
I'm gonna slide all these back until they fill up the entire screen
there now we've got our 1 second loop within these 12 frames
for the rotating lines I've created a new comp that's a
bit larger than our main comp and I've got one line coming out from the exact
center I'm gonna add a repeater I need to add repeater give it 12 copies and
change the transform on the repeater to its position between 0 and its rotation
to be 30 I'm gonna zoom in and adjust that anchor point so it all lines up in
the middle there we are I made the rotation 30 degrees so each copy would
be rotated an additional 30 degrees and over 12 copies that would fill out a complete circle
to figure out the angle you need to make a full circle, you can click into the rotation field and do
some simple math in there so we can do 360 and / which means
division and then the number copies you have so we have 12 so it's
gonna calculate 360 divided by 12 which is 30 degrees and like an absolute nerd
After Effects will do all of the math for you
now let's duplicate this line's layer as well add a rotation at the beginning of
our work area here and then at the end let's rotate this by 30 degrees as well
so now we've got a rotation that lines up with the next line great here's what
that looks like back in our main comp to get the warping on this comp I'm going
to add the effect twirl now this is a really fun effect I definitely recommend
you just go in and play with all the different settings I ended up with the
angle of 120 and the radius of 100 so it fills our entire comp we can easily push
this angle further to get like a really intense spiral
now let's create our eye shape by double clicking on the eclipse tool up here double clicking on the
shape up here we'll create a shape that fills our entire comp let's call that eye
because we always label our layers and if we toggle down to its path we need to
right-click and select convert to Bezier path so we can make some adjustments I'm
gonna select my convert to vertex tool over here and I'm just gonna click on
the left and right and Bezier points and clicking on them will remove their
Bezier handles and create this nice almond shape that we see and now if we
set its blending mode to stencil alpha will turn everything underneath it and
that layers that transparent that isn't included within the shape so everything
not in that shape becomes transparent let's duplicate that again and let's
change the blending mode back to normal go back to our pen tool and I'm going to
adjust this top handle and drag that down to create a nice eyelid I'm gonna
fill out with some gray and now our base animation is complete let's get ready for printing
I duplicated that comp to create a printer-friendly version so I
didn't waste any black ink so I made the black fills very pale gray and then
added a black stroke to some of the circles and then made a new comp with
this layer with some additional information that I wanted to be on each
printout I created these registration marks down here which just masks over a
comp with two rectangles in it so that we just get those crosshairs and then
I've also added a frame counter on the top left here just so I know what order
the frames are gonna be in when I import them and scan them back in and you can
add this by simply adding the time code affect that I've added to an adjustment
layer and then added this to the render queue and then said as output module to
be a PNG sequence which will render an image for every frame
I traced over these using this Huion A4 light pad Huion sent me this and this was the
first time I used it if you don't have a lightbox you can trace over your guides
by either holding your paper up to a window using some very thin paper or
just drawing straight over your printouts a good lightbox does give you
more flexibility and this one feels and works great the build quality is nice
and it's very light it just plugs into a USB port and you're off running and I'm
gonna trace over it with standard 80 GSM A4 printing paper the light pack
comes with the clip but because I'm going to be rotating this a lot and I'm
not worried about damaging the top paper at all I use two pieces of masking tape
to keep them aligned the first thing we need to do is mark down the frame number
and trace over the registration marks as closely as possible and they'll make
aligning them in after-effects a lot easier from here I traced over the
outlines for each of the frames and once the outlining is done we can turn the
light off and start the rendering now this is the part that takes a lot of
time it took me about 15 to 20 minutes for each frame which for 12 frames came
out to just under four hours so a perfect time to spend the afternoon
catching up on podcasts or just contemplating your existence and asking
yourself Am I just a render engine made of sentient meat? I put another piece
of paper under my right hand as well to stop me smudging it as I drew I wasn't
too careful about being precise because the whole point of this was to make it
look hand-drawn and give it some unique texture that I couldn't fake in
after-effects towards the end I started to fear that the way I was shading them
made the dark areas look a bit like a doughnuty sphincter so please don't
mention that in the comments I know it's a bit sphinctery in the middle but
leave it at that once they were all done I scanned them in and imported them into
After Effects so I imported them into a comp and then added some guides to make
aligning them up a little easier but just set the Anchor Point up into the corner
here where our registration mark is and then just kept nudging the rotation
until it lined up with all the others and this is close enough and here's what
the scanned in files look like I was pretty happy with it it's pretty close
to what I had imagined the boil and the texture feel really nice maybe I
imagined it a tad less sphinctery but that's the joys of
animation happy accidents I think it kind of looks cool with the you know the
boiling of the registration marks and even with the tape as well I cleaned it
up by adding a mask just around the eye to clean up all the smudges and
registration marks and all that other stuff and then I had a take curves
effect to increase the contrast and that was pretty much it for cleaning it up I
decided to play around with duplicating that comp and offsetting each one by a
frame so each frame has all 12 drawings in it
this I thought looked really cool and I was really trying to milk those frames
for all they were worth just to make myself feel a little bit better about
spending so much time drawing them also try laying them out in the circle which
I thought looked kind of neat and then rotating that circle looks kind of neat
as well I landed on this square one with 12 copies being my favorite combination
to put on social media it was close enough to see that pencil textures in
the eyeball but had enough copies so it still had a bit more impact it took
about six hours all up to get this result i did learn a bunch and had some
fun along the way and also we've got something that I couldn't have done just
inside a computer but let me know was it worth it I made a short playlist or some
related videos that'll think you'll enjoy if you're better this far I'll see
you in the next video and please consider subscribing if you'd like more
of these videos every week
subtitle: Zoe J Marriott