The Final Export!
Scrapbook Elvis was an assignment from School of Motion’s Animation Bootcamp. It’s a great exercise that showed me that animation isn’t always about super clean geometric shapes that move with the utmost elegance.
Sometimes animation can be choppy, greasy and full of character
at the same damn time!
Challenge
“Animate a documentary intro sequence about a man whose nickname is Scrapbook Elvis because he loves his scrapbook and has big big big sideburns.”
Process
Familiarise myself with the Storyboard and Voiceover
What can I move around?
Putting it all together!
Storyboard and Voiceover
I have these uhh sideburns
aaaand i like to scrapbook
so yeah - I’m scrapbook elvis
mmhmm Oh yeah!
Ok - So I’m getting an idea for who this guy is. He’s a simple fella - likes two things: scrapbookin’ and sidburns. That’s all. Looks like he also loves America, pizza, guitars, beers and Elvis. Doesn’t really mind a grease stain here or there neither.
The tone of voice seems to be very chill, real and whimsical. Especially considering that there’s a lot of whistling on the backing track too.
2. What can I move around?
The real question is what can’t I move around?
The Storyboards have a several layers of different items that can all be moved around. When I opened the Photoshop file in After Effects I could see a huge list of editable layers. First thing I did was group them all into pre-comps. I can then focus on moving them all one at a time.
To keep the scrappy style of the piece I used exclusively Hold Keyframes. You can see it in the video below where I show the letters moving across the screen. Hold Keyframes give the movement a stop motion feel. As if Scrapbook Elvis himself has made this intro. Below I have a picture of what the keyframes looked like, plus a videos of the letters. One video has the bounding boxes included.
3. Putting it all together
We have lots of crazy elements dancing around and some good voiceover. Now we just need those final touches to make it a bit more believable. Here’s where I started using expressions.
I do love an expression every now and then to make things a bit easier. The main theme of this project is stop motion so I’m going to use the good ole posterizeTime() and wiggle() expressions.
The first expression, posterizeTime(), changes how often the viewport updates. Usually it updates every frame, but posterizeTime() sets a new rate. I’ve kept it super low at 4 so that everything looks janky as hell.
Wiggle will move a parameter depending on two numbers you give it. The first number sets the frequency and the second number sets a max value for the property to reach. Wiggle will randomly select numbers in the range you give it.
Combined, these two expressions will randomly update the property with a new value every few frames.
From the picture, you can see that I’ve placed a Posterize Time expression the Vignette’s opacity property for this comp, as well as the Background’s rotation property. Then underneath that - a wiggle expression.
You can see it in the final video at the top of this page. This provides the finishing touches for this stop motion look.
The imperfections of someone moving the background by accident, or the room lightbulb being a bit flickery. These small details really give the animation a bit of personality and character. Like a little sprinkling of salt and pepper to taste.
Here’s the rotation of the background in the graph editor with posterizeTime(4); wiggle(3, 0.5);
This means the frame is changing every 3 frames but rotating within a range of 0 to 0.5 degrees at each stage.
You might be thinking - why didn’t you do this for all your other elements in this animation? I definitely could have! However, the control you get from placing each hold frame yourself definitely outweighs the convenience of using expressions here.
I hope you enjoyed that little dive into Scrapbook Elvis from School of Motion’s Animation Bootcamp course. If you have any questions, feel free to get in contact!