Loops and Living Holds

My loop and living hold animation stages including the use of coding and the wiggler tool.

I chose to create Tommy cooper for my character, the reason behind this is that I knew that Tommy cooper always famously wore a hat and suit with a bow tie. I felt that because of these features the character would be recognisable and easy to identify. Also because of his unique personality and the fact that he was a comedian it gave me the idea of creating his movements to be almost comedic. After I had thought about all this I Imported the vector into After effects first assuring that everything that I wanted to animate was on a different layer on Illustrator. 

After I had imported we manoeuvred the Anchor points on every layer I wanted to animate so the animation appeared more realistic, this helped identify the centre of gravity and help me realise how the different objects would actually move with Tommy as he moved. For example: The feather on the hat I made would swing from side to side as tommy moved so it made sense for the centre of gravity where I put the anchor point to be at the point where the feather joined to the hat itself. We did this with every layer until we was happy by using the anchor point tool then it was time to 

start animating.

Next, we looked at the layers themselves and realised that when we moved one layer no other layers followed. This wasn't that much of a problem since we could use the parent tool to make child layers follow parent layers. This as a whole made animation a lot easier and it made the movements appear more lifelike and smooth. I connected every layer in a certain order to ensure that the layers followed the right layers. I ended on the suit because I felt that this was the biggest centre of gravity because of how large it was and how little animation I would be doing with the layer anyway. 

 We animated using various layers and keyframes in different orders making sure that the last keyframe was the same as the first one, this created the Loop effect that we were trying to create. The loop effect made it look like an endless animation and I was happy with the outcome of the animation; but now it was time to touch up a few things and make them look more professional. We did this by using the wiggler tool which I will explain next. 

After I had made the basic animation using keyframes and parenting layers, we looked at the "Wiggler" tool (Window,Wiggler) these were the settings that came up. First we had to select and action, I chose the rotation tool on the HAT layer as I felt that the hat would be moving on my characters head as he moved. Once I had selected my action we looked at the settings and worked out what we were trying to achieve. The Frequency tool and the Magnitude tool were the main settings that we focused on when creating this wiggle effect. Frequency was how fast the wiggle was and magnitude was how big the wiggle was. This meant that we had to find the correct balance of frequency and magnitude to make the wiggle look more realistic. I did this well and I feel that I am going to use this tool in the future because of how useful it is to make movements seem more lifelike.

 This is what the "wiggle" looked like in the layers panel. The more messy it looked the bigger the magnitude and frequency.

We did the same thing but with a different method to see which one we preferred. This was a quicker and easier way of making the wiggle effect using Coding. By holding ALT and clicking on the stopwatch we accessed this text box which held the words "transform.position" we changed this text to "wiggle(Frequency,Magnitude)" by inserting numbers into the frequency and magnitude we made the wiggle quicker and simpler. We could easily change the magnitude and frequency by using bigger and smaller numbers depending on what effect you wanted to achieve. 

I found some textures online and used them in places where I thought a texture could be useful. The aim of this was not to be too in your face as make the texture seem more subtle and not really noticeable, this added to the design and overall made the character look more complete. I am happy with the outcome. 

Personal note: I found this tutorial to be a helpful and creative task, I enjoyed the process and the steps we went through to completing this tutorial. I am going to use the Loop and living hold techniques in future animation and I feel learning how to use the wiggler tool has helped me realise how I can make my animation look more lifelike. 

Tommy Cooper from Josh Juhasz on Vimeo.

Here is the completed animation on my Vimeo account!