Warm Up My Animation
I came across a Ben Marriott tutorial about how to animate fire in After Effects, and I loved its style. After playing around with it, I decided to spend a little time on a side project expanding on the idea. VIOLA - I created the above looping animation using the following applications.
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Fresco
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
To start, I used Adobe Photoshop and Fresco to storyboard and concept my idea.
Warm Up My Animation Storyboard - Page 1
Warm Up My Animation Storyboard - Page 2
Warm Up My Animation - Concept Art 1
Warm Up My Animation - Concept Art 2
After arriving at a (rough) concept, I started creating vectors with Adobe Illustrator.
As part of my design process, I tried to use an ellipse as a guide for most of the curves, and I decided to wait to do the Text elements along with the shadows within After Effects during the later animation phase. Of course, I used Battle Axe's Overlord to move layers over to After Effects.
This is where the fun begins. Once I had brought over the vectors into After Effects, I started animating my design, and I had more ideas on how to add movement. I applied the same concepts in the Ben Marriott tutorial to animate fire to also animate the shadows. I originally planned to do the shadows a bit differently, and inspiration struck when I started creating them. They're one of my favorite parts of the project. Though it's subtle, I also added subtle light flickers overlaying both the ground and trees.
As part of my final touches in After Effects, I animated the design so that it loops. This was one of the aspects where I had to suppress my perfectionism, and it's a skill I'm wanting to upgrade. Also, I want to keep optimizing my use of Pre-Comps to more quickly create animations.
Before starting my audio mix, I exported a lower quality export from After Effects, and I imported it into the appropriate Premiere Pro project within my Premiere Productions workflow. I used SFX from Adobe's free library as well as YouTube Studio's free library. I exported the audio mix as a .WAV file, and I imported it into the After Effects project before the final export.
Also, I made a small little GIF version.
If you've kept reading this far, thanks! You da real MVP. And for real, let me know what you think!