Mixed Media Animation - Boiling Technique

James Braithwaite - I Met the Walrus from POCKO on Vimeo.

The above example is made up of an audio recording featuring John Lennon and photographic articles combined with hand drawn and vector illustration. This combination paired with the wiggles and boiling techniques creates the aesthetic of a schoolboy's notebook, which co-insides with the source of the audio. The animator has created interesting interactions between the background noise in the audio and the visuals appearing within the film.


Forest: Just One Day from Johnny Kelly on Vimeo.

"Forest: Just One Day" has a much more simplistic style in comparison with "I Met the Walrus", however the video holds interest through the use of transient interlaced imagery.

To start with we needed to draw a basic subject three times over as this would make up our “boiling” image. The drawing seen in the upper left was my first attempt and I was advised that it may be useful to simplify the design as the exercise requires to draw out the image once more when in After Effects. I took this advice and produced the following three sketches, we needed three as when two variations are used this typically doesn’t sit right with the viewer and resembles an error as opposed to when we use a minimum of three, as this create the “movement”. Although these replications of the image are meant to be different, we need to be careful to not overly alter the image and aim to stay true to the original as it is only requires minute variation for this to work.

Sketches used

It is important to draw the subjects on the same size paper in the same area as to make life generally easier when needing to crop them out in Photoshop. We were given the suggestion of holding the shift key down while dragging the selected marquee from one window to the next, however this seemed to place the marquee wherever the mouse was placed and so wasn’t effective at obtaining the same area of the page. As an alternative to this I overlaid the different images in one window as to match up the subjects and used this as a way to ensure my selection were effective. As to ensure a hard copy of the original files we saved these as high res but then made another copy in low-res 72dpi for the purpose of the on screen animation. Each of the files needed to be saved as “Name_001.jpg” for instance, as to ensure proper numbering and navigation to each frame.

Import As: JPEG Sequence

As set up in all videos we have created so far, the composition needs to be set at 25fps in HD with the duration of 10 seconds. However when it comes to importing the imagery it becomes slightly different as in this case we need to import the three images as a “Jpeg Sequence” this ensures that the software knows to keep these files together within their own composition and so saves time.  

Interpret Footage

Once I had the sequence in my library I went to File>Interpret Footage>Main and then set the frame rate to 25fps as to match the video’s composition while also slowing down the speed at which it cycles through the images, this helps to give it a naturalistic feel. Under loop this is set to 50 as to ensure it plays throughout the whole 10 seconds. Once you have imported and placed the chosen audio track and jpeg sequence into the composition, the sequence then needs to be stretched along the timeline. In order to effectively carry this out, I needed to right-click on the timeline window and select stretch as to add this into the displayed properties. Now I simply selected and dragged the 100% value until it reached 200%, this further slows down the video in order for us to work on “ones” or single frames.

Textures Used

For the background I sourced a variation of subtle textures available to use under the creative commons license. On the hand drawn sequence, if this is changed to multiply on the layer mode then this knocks out any white while retaining the black areas therefore making the backdrop to the subject seamless. For the way the hand drawing appears on the video there are many ways in which it can be altered, by opacity, blend modes and effect controls. Finally in order to enable the image to “draw itself” we need to use the pen tool and trace around our subject. Once we are nearing the end of the shape we need to leave it open, this is because we are only wanting the line to be affected, not the whole area. This step is repeated for each different line, however when doing this on my file an error occurred which caused the effects to not work and this is something that needs to be looked into as to find the cause. I tried restarting After Effects and this didn’t remedy it, so duplicated the affected layer to which it partially worked, however not properly even though no human error could be seen. Due to this I traced around my image once more from scratch, though to keep up to speed I created just the one singular line.

In order for it to encompass the whole image I used the feather tool to displace the area it would reveal. An important area to note with this technique is that when you are drawing multiple lines they should be drawn in the same order that you wish them to appear, i.e. if you want the image to appear from left to right and then delay the time to which each line appears as to look hand drawn. However before the effect is in place you need to go to effect, generate and select stroke on the shape’s layer.

Below you can see the final video. I really enjoyed this session, as I found the techniques to be of interest due to the traditional style and in turn its grounded feel.

Hand-drawn Sketches from Nicole H.D.W. Sinclair on Vimeo.