Turntable Guy - Personal Project

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I stumbled across Jesse Kassel’s work while looking for references for a client’s work.
The above illustration was stuck in my head for a few days and I wanted to bring Turntable Guy to life.

All the assets were recreated using Illustrator and sent to After Effects using Overlord plugin by BattleAxe. Nearly everything was animated using shape layers and expression in AE. For the limbs I used Limber plugin by Animatable. To give more dimension to the animation I used faux 3D techniques for the turntable box, shoes and the tonearm.

I made a rough and quick animatic to help me to visualise my idea for the animation. The music had a nice rhythm and once I added the timing, all of the elements began to work together.

Each body’s side is a shape layer and each corner’s side are parent (using expressions) to a null with a 3D position. A main null control everything. To avoid unwanted overlapping from the body sides, I used expressions to switch the transparency to 0 when it is not visible by the camera.

Using shape layers for the heel and a taper stroke for the front of the shoe, I animated each shape layer path point to fake a 180-degree turn and give the illusion of a 3D rotation.

Hands, hands and more hands. I tried to imitate the dynamics in Jesse’s illustration style for the new hand poses.

Rigging done. Everything works correctly in conjunction with Limber. I used expressions to bring data from different precomps, for example, when the body rotates everything follows it. The faux 3D works like a charm.