Something that has always interested me in design and animation is character rigid. This is the technique that allows you to animate artwork for movement or other purposes. This can be done two ways. One of these is using the puppet tool which will bend parts of the character depending on where you pin it , i felt that this way wasn't as suitable for my begin therefore sadly had to go the long way around it.
The method i used to animate my character involved creating each individual part in illustrator and importing to after effects. Once imported i parented all the parts to each other to keep the character together. When i first tried to make my character walk i struggled massively , ending up in my character looking as if he was kicking his face. After some helpful advice i imported an image of the walk cycle to help me keyframe the character. I made sure the the first and last keyframe matched up so i could loop the short walk cycle into a long one saving me a lot of time.
After finishing this design i was very happy with it and wanted to take it further. I chose to adapt my design for my website to use it as an animated background. I feel that this would add some personalisation to my site and make it a lot more interesting to look at. I also added a cart to my character that had icons of software that i use fall into it from the top of the page. The cart was simply animated and i used the puppet pins tool to make the top path move with my characters arm.
Although this did take up a lot of personal time i feel that it has developed my personal skill level on after effects massively as i wasn't very confident beforehand. The character rigging techniques will also come in handy for the future as i feel slight animation of artwork can make it look very professional and effective
