Aftereffects Artist statement

This is a trailer for the Joe Hill novel Horns that I made for my digital media class. 

So there are Four basic animations here. There are the Horns, the Pitchfork, the Tail, and finally the Title.

In making the horns I drew them on a layer in Photoshop on top of the head of the stick man using paintbrush tools, then I used an eraser to sharpen the image. I transferred that layer into aftereffects but in aftereffects i had the horns on a lower layer than the stick man. Then the animation was just moving them up over time, giving the illusion of growth.

Making the Pitchfork rise was a similar process but in this case it moves up from off screen. I would like to note that that pitchfork it symmetrical down to the last pixel. I put a lot of work into that.

The tail was both the hardest thing to draw and to animate. I had never used the pen tool before and so i had no idea how to use it but after thirty minutes i had it down and made a tail that I was happy with. The animation however was much trickier. All on line tutorials say to use an effect called write on, however this is a third party effect and not available on the computers i was using. So instead I made a black object to match the background and, both moved and shape shifted the object over time. This slow uncovering of the object created the illusion of growth. The hardest part of the shape shifting was getting the arrow of the two end points of the tail arrow to grow in the right direction, coming off of the main arrow point instead of forming in mid air and meeting the arrow point.

Finally the text. I used a very similar technique to the tail uncovering.

The music I chose was just some horror pipe organ music from the copyright cleared library. But it really makes the project and adds a certain “muahaha” factor that I really like.

If I was going to change something I might add a smile at the end just to have a little something more after the rest finished growing. The only reason I didn't was because to do that means the other animations would happen too fast. Also I might have chosen a better colour for the title to make it “pop” more.