After Effects CS5 302: Cartoon Animation Basics

31 videos | 146 minutes | by Richard Lainhart

Learn how to animate photos and create basic characters in the style of “South Park”, “Monty Python” and “Jib Jab” in this tutorial, Cartoon Animation Basics, by After Effects expert Richard Lainhart.

Character animation in After Effects can produce some very effective and entertaining results. In this tutorial you will learn all the basics of creating easy-to-produce characters syncing their mouth and body motions to voice and music tracks.

Richard’s first project is a Monty Python-style Mouth Animation. Richard animates his own mouth in sync to a voice-over track! (This is a real mind bender since he is also narrating the tutorial!) He shows you all the steps required to create this popular effect including duplicating, splitting, masking layers, and even designing silly-looking teeth.You’ll also learn how to “spot” the audio track with markers to synchronize the animation to the audio.

The next section is all about Replacement Animation with Time Remapping. Here you’ll learn how to easily “swap out” a series of heads with different mouth shapes to create some very cool quick-cut lip-sync animation effects. You’ll also learn how to generate automatic lip-sync with the Split effect using audio keyframes and scripting via “Expressions”—no JavaScript experience required.

In the last section, Richard shows you the basics of After Effects’ puppet animation features where you’ll learn to how to create a character in Photoshop, create hinged joint points (or “rigging”) for the character in After Effects, and then animate that character in perfect sync to a soundtrack! Included in this project are tips on designing a character for rigging, techniques for cutting up the character into separate parts in Photoshop , how to create correct Parent-Child relationships for your character’s parts in After Effects, and finally, how to make your character dance to the music.

If you want to learn how to animate characters, this After Effects tutorial “Cartoon Animation Basics” by Richard Lainhart is the perfect collection of videos to get you headed on your way!