In early March 2020 I attended an Advanced After Effects Training course in London.
With the pandemic sweeping the world and some time on my hands, I decided to try my hand at creating a frame-by-frame style animation.
This was somewhat new to me as it involved character animation and applying core animation principles which I hadn't always needed in my commercial work.
My process and timeframes were as follows:
Idea and storyline: 0.5 hours
Research & development: 1 hour
Draft storyboard (stick figures): 1 hour
Detailed storyboard and Animatic (shown above): 4 hours
Detailed styleframes (shown below): 8 hours
Frame by frame animation of each scene: Approx 20 hours
Adding textures and effects: 1 hour
Recording and adding audio: 1.5 hours
Animation truly is a time-consuming, but very rewarding enterprise. As you can see, his project took close to 40 hours to complete, for 15 seconds of film! You can watch the final result below.