How to create motion comic effect in After Effects/Premiere

[Peterfae]

hey all.  I've been deeply inspired by the styles of motion comic creation on YouTube.  I'm wanting to create a motion comic, with the panning zooming in and out on the panels in a dynamic way, and wondering about a workflow on that.  Does anyone have any experience in this?

[Mylenium]

It's simply about creating pre-comps and stitching them together in a main comp, then animating the position and scale of the layers.

Mylenium

[Peterfae]

Hey I just got this thank you.  I'm not exactly sure what you mean about creating pre-comps and then stitching them together.  I went into Premiere and created some keyframes to pan, zoom and move through the comic page which was serviceable, but i'm considering how individual panels within After Effects could have entire videos inside of them within the comic book page that i'm wondering how to do.  Can you explain another way so I understand the basis of what you. mean by pre-comps and then stitching them together? Animating the position & scale I understand.  Thanks for your patience.  Just learning.  

[thepixelsmith]

For specific workflow and animation techniques your best bet would be to check out some tutorials on YouTube or book a tutoring session with one of the services that does that like Wyzant or Varsitytutors.

You might get lucky here and someone who has created Motion Comics might see this post but there is no gaurantee of that. 

That being said the way i have done it in the past:

1. Design and storyboard out the animation I want to create from the comics. This is really important becasue the way you want to animate a panel will affect how that panel needs to be layered and organized in teh next step.
2. Use Photoshop to cut up the comic art into layers. Once I had layered are given to me but that seems to be rare.
3. Organize the Photoshop layers into groups (these will import into AE as nested compositions [precomps]).
4. Import the Photoshop files into AE as compositions.
5. Animate, add effects maybe some video in AE.