While brainstorming, I knew I wanted to incorporate something that I loved that would help fuel my passion for the project. In this instance, that ended up being the chocolate-covered fruit goodness of Trufru. I wanted to create a fun, fruit-character walk-cycle animation that could be used as a reel for Trufru to promote their products. I was really inspired by the different elements on the website from the colors and high contrast of the blues and reds to the animated shifting text fonts.
Working with After Effects for this project was a great growth experience. I’ve been able to work in the program a few times before, but I wanted to take this opportunity to push myself and my animating skills and learn how to use plugins like Joysticks ‘n Sliders and Rubberhose. In the end, Rubberhose came out on top and was used for the final animations.
Throughout the project, I experienced a lot of trial and error, but I learned so much from it and from the feedback I was able to receive on it. Luckily, I wasn’t scared off from all my time spent in After Effects, and I’m looking forward to the next project I can animate!
In the midst of working on the animations, I decided to take a quit keyframe break and create a couple of stickers of the fruit characters I created. I thought it was a fun way to further showcase the combo of fruit and chocolate for a delicious treat in the form of a sticker.
When prepping for the animation, I learned a lot from the extra step in the process of having to think about how my assets would need to be built out to interact the right way with each of the different elements to make it go as smoothly as possible. I kept the limbs and extremities simple so I could rig everything up for that nice rubber hose look.
I wanted to keep the other shapes and designs simple and playful to go with the playful fruit characters. To incorporate the chocolate element, I made little chocolate chunks with bites taken out of them that could resemble a heart when turned a certain way to go with the theme of “What’s not to love?”.
While I was working, I got the feedback to format all my elements in my Illustrator document before trying to animate them. This allowed me to have a clearer idea of what the end product should look like and how the layers would interact. I originally planned to have a square design, but ended up going with the Reel format.
Thanks for following along! Here’s the final videos: