Character animation

[Jema3668209549v1]

Hey all,

I am trying to animate a character walking through a webpage. I have a video of the webpage movements and clicks etc and want to animate a peacock over this video.

What is the best approach, animate the character in Animate or in AE? The video is 11min long.

I have tried to do this in Animate, however ran into issues with saving an opening. I would lose my work every time I closed the app and layers would be invisable when opening. The communiy suggested this could be due to the warp tool or even the camera tool I used.

So, I took the animation into AE which is new for me and although I have managed to rig a character, I can't figure out how to animate it, scale, move, etc without the rig messing it up. I'm new to animation and not even sure if AE is the right software to get the job done. I wanted to reach out and see what suggestions people have before I commit more time to possible mistakes.

Many thanks!

[Rick Gerard]

The best advice I can give you is to break your eleven-minute video into scenes that are only a few seconds long. Each scene would be a separate comp. The scenes would include the start and end of the move through the web page from one point of interest, button, headline, or section to the next one.

The average shot (time between edits) in a modern action movie is 4 seconds; in a horror film, it is a little less than 16 seconds. Some directors like to do incredibly long takes and then use single shots in their live-action movies, but that is rare, and most of these shots are not longer than a minute or two. 

It takes years to create and months to render all the shots in a Pixar movie, and hundreds of animators work on the project. None of the animators do all the work on a single shot by themselves. It takes several shots make a scene. A bunch of scenes make an act, and there are usually at least three acts in a movie. 

Pick points where you want the character to make changes in direction, click a button, or emphasize a point, then cut the video. When you get it all cut up, create a new comp from each cut, then animate your character working their way through the shot. When the character successfully follows the action by discovering a new button or feature on the web page, that shot is done. Render that comp and stick it in a bin. Save a frame of the last position of the character and use that for the first frame of the continuing journey through the shot to keep the action consistent. That's how they made the film 1917 to look like a single shot. That's the only workflow that makes any sense. Spending days, weeks, or even months animating an 11-minute video, then trying to render it in one go, is not only incredibly inefficient, it's risky. 

Working on individual shots that are only a few seconds long and then rendering them will allow you the freedom to make sure that animation works and the story is told well. More importantly, it will give you the opportunity to correct the few frames of one of the actions that just does not work well instead of re-rendering the entire 11-minute movie.

I hope this helps. 

[Jema3668209549v1]

Thanks for the tips, Rick!

I come from a video editing background so thought 11mins wouldn't be a big deal. I've split it up and gone back into Animate. I think my error there was the way I was inporting the layer files.

Thanks again!