Shadows and Regrets

History:

Shadows and Regrets is a song by the band Yellowcard and is also the name of the movie. It's a music video I made for my 2D Digital Animation class in which the focus was learning After Effects CS3. I didn't know anything about AE going into the class and my teacher didn't really help either. I took it upon myself to learn it on my own like most other things.

I created my story and designed the characters and began storyboarding. In the meantime, I would mess around with AE to get to know the interface and get some ideas as to what this program was capable of producing. Once I figured out the basics, my teacher taught me a way to animate the characters inside of AE. It was basically puppeteering and left no room for any sort of control that would make a good animation...I just wasn't having it. I resorted back to good ol' Flash and decided to do a traditional piece, like I had planned, just doing it the hard way.

I created each shot in a different scene of Flash and kept everything as organized as I could. I sketched backgrounds and colored them in Photoshop then imported them into AE in a shot composition. Each comp was its own shot so it would be easy to manipulate. I would import the .swf files into AE and mess around with them, added in a camera, and just had fun with the shot comp. Later on as my project began to grow in size, I ran into a huge problem that jeopardized the whole production. Of course, it was nearing the due date too. Everytime AE opened up my file, it would crash. I tried on multiple computers, multiple save increments, and everytime it would crash to where I was unable to do anything. After a while, I had to get away from importing .swf files and came up with the alternative of importing png sequences which turned out to be perfect because AE recognizes the sequence and considers it a single asset.