AWAVEN Part 1 of 2: 2d cut out animation in after effects with watercolor drawings

When a ship gets lost at sea, the captain and his crew begin to lose hope as they buckle under the famine and fatigue. Back on land, the captain's wife refuses to wait any longer and takes things into her own hands.

Created using watercolor and ink paper dolls, put together in photoshop, and animated in Adobe After Effects CS3 as a senior directing project at Northwestern University.




Tags: love rats mice russia Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov classical music fantasia musical dog animated animating cut out stop motion no dialogue silent fantasy compass mast crew shipmen seamen disney love devotion fear hope loyalty dreams lightning disney love hope devotion loyalty 2d traditional computer hand drawn painted

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Northwestern
• University
• Vanessa
• Soberanis
• senior
• directing
• project
• thesis
• ships
• ocean
• boats
• sea
• storm
• animation
• anime
• art
• experimental
• filmmaker
• reel
• short
• film

[djmercer68]

Fine work..beautifully created.

Did you shoot 35mm then capture or on betamax?

You did not use flash to animate with imported drawings.

Just intrigued.

I try to do a similar thing.

[playdohartist]

Thank you!

Actually it's neither, I animated in after effects. First I drew all the sets and characters, then I scanned them in to the computer, and animated them like paperdolls on the computer. It can definitely be done through a real camera that way(look at yuri norstein's work), but I didn't have the time to do that. Good luck!

[catchthatrain]

so wonderful, I'm happy to have found this! How long did it take to make on shooting/editing and how many people needed? :o)

[playdohartist]

Thanks so much! Overall I worked on it for about 9 months after classes and on weekends. Pure animation was from february- april, and then it took a couple weeks to edit it together with the sound. I averaged about 20-30 hours a week for most of the time and then about 60 hours a week in the final month. It was only me, and my boyfriend did the sound design.

[playdohartist]

I would use the creative cow tutorials. You can go to the creative cow website and look for tutorials on puppet animating and other specific effects. the videos are super helpful!

[wordswords22]

so lovely and so inspiring!



[NightmarePictures001]

This is really beautiful! Did you use water colour to colour this? Or did you colour it in After effects? I'm really curious because I too want to do something like this :). Thanks

[gdiggle123]

i love cut out animation!!

[becks7ification]

very nice scribbles.. it goes perfect with the watercolor.. well done

[fadihhhh]

ITS A FANTASTIC JOB

[TheAnimator21]

@djmercer68 You can do this sort of animation just type in The Coprophagic Boy (Rough Edit) on youtube

Its amazing like this animation!

[TheAnimator21]

@djmercer68 You can do this type of animation on flash quite easily

[nowimaginethat]

Very nice, powerful emotional feel to it. Nice story and the music was matserfully done to the story. thanks for sharing your labor of love

[yahtze666]

Beautiful work - the choice of colors and Scheherrazade for the music is perfect ... The drawings are compelling. Congratulations.

[goji2099]

You said you used After Effects for the animation. I assume you imported the different hand drawn peices and used the program to move, am I correct? Me and my Girlfriend were thinking with my animation and her art, we could make. She was thinking doing something with paper dolls, and I was more interested in Silhoutte animation. I think this, however, would really compliment her amazing art.