I loved loved loved this workshop! It was basically “only” a refreshment of our learnt skills from last year but with some small additional steps. It is obviously great to learn new skills but working with knowledge you already have and updating that… I just don’t feel as big of an idiot. I know what I’m doing, I’m good at it (most of the time) and it’s just simply fun!

We started of cutting up the robot below. Because different parts are covered up by other body parts, we had to fix that by drawing and copying in the missing bits. With all the different body parts on different layers we could now import our robot in to After Effects and start animating him.

The first two steps were to place the anchor points and parent the different parts to each other. By parenting the body and the the legs to a null object the robot was also able to rock from side to side. The background we used is a picture of the Lincoln cathedral. To place the robot in to the middle of the town we masked the houses in the foreground and placed the robot between the front and background image. We parented the null object and the two images with another null object which moves up and down every time the robot moves forwards that that it looks like the earth is shaking.

Later on I added some sound to make it all more dramatic and voilà this is what it looks like: