Musical Inspiration...Or Is It Animation?

When thinking about this project, I had recently been playing my ukulele and it was sitting on my bed next to me and I had an idea. For this animation, I'm going to do a hula girl (get it? Ukulele sitting next to me + constant desire to go on a tropical vacation to hawaii + hula girl = inspiration). But, not just a dancing hula girl, a hula girl on a dash board. I got everything sketched out and started my illustrator file. And I was so excited, only to find that I lacked the time to really make that work. I wanted to spend time to learn more about the animation software, so what did I do? I switched gears back to the Soul Notes gig poster. 

While it's not nearly as cool as a hula girl, it still had to do with music and still turned out fine and dandy. Although, my design process was a little different. Since I already had the assets, I jumped right into my first animation draft. 

Draft One - Figuring Out What I'm Actually Doing

For this first draft, the hardest part was figuring out how to actually make things move. Watching others it looked to simplistic, but let me tell you, it's not that simplistic. Well, it is, but it isn't. You following me? Amyways, I started with the earring. I made her earring swing back and forth and that went pretty smoothly. The hard part was the music notes coming out of her hair. I wanted them to fade as they went up and couldn't figure out how to make them do that smoothly. Below is an image, as well as a video to explain. 

Draft Two - So. Many. Notes.

How many notes you ask? Normally, I would say I'll let you count, but I'll be nice and tell you that there are sixteen! Way too many in my opinion. But I wanted them to all move a little different so I had to do that many! I solved my sporadic opacity issues by adding some more frames in the Adobe After Effects software. Now it was just adding all of those notes! 

The Final Draft & Extra Animations

I finished off my animation here by finishing the notes, making the afro scale a bit, and making the earring rotate a little more noticeably. This final draft and product were a lot about fine tuning details and making sure that I had everything all done the way I wanted and everything moved the way I wanted. Overall, this animation project was so fun and such a great learning curve. It was nice to learn a brand new piece of software and the challenges it brought. And with all of that said and done, here is the final product!