Animating in Adobe After effects

To animate in after effects, first i had to import the bear and scene. I made a different after effect file for each scene, i felt this helped me organise and work better. The method of animating we mainly used was key framing. This was the most convenient way for us to move each part of the body individually and get it in the right and correct position on each key frame.

To begin, I firstly parented all the separate body parts of the bear to each other. For example, the hand to the arm and then the arm to the body and so on. Parenting did have draw backs at certain times. This was when i wanted to undo a parented body part and make it do something completely different. This would however also undo the parented scene before it e.g the limbs would disjoint. To overcome this, I rendered the scene up to the point where the parenting was necessary, then I imported the second scene without the parenting and joined them together.

Then I key framed the animation and at times where the movement didn't seem realistic enough, i used the puppet tool to a certain body part/parts to get a fluid movement. The motion graph and speed graph was used to get smoother movements or right timing.