Coral Reef
Hand-Drawn Digital Animation
Client
Personal Project
This is the final project I created for the course “Hand-Drawn Digital Animation: Bring Illustrations to Life” by Yukai Du. I designed the illustration in Photoshop and animated it using After Effects and Animate, focusing on smooth frame-by-frame motion in the transition and adding visual effects to create an underwater feel. For this project, I wanted to create something original that communicated a coherent message.
Supplies
For this project, I used:
Adobe Photoshop to create the main illustration in a hand-drawn style, focusing on bright contrasting colors and textured lines to stylize and approximate the content.
Adobe Animate to draw the frame-by-frame transition sequence, animating the turtle transitioning into the plastic bottle.
Adobe After Effects to create the sequence and timing, animate the abstract background objects and foreground subjects, and add visual effects to create an underwater feel.
Step 1: Mood Board & Sketches
I began by creating a mood board on Pinterest to gather inspiration and define the visual direction. I used Adobe Color to create a color palette from my mood board. Then, I made a few early sketches to explore the shapes, style, and overall concept.
Step 2: Storyboard & Style Frames
I created a storyboard to plan out the animation sequence. This helped me define the key moments: the turtle, the transformation, the plastic bottler, and reverse sequence to close the loop. Then, I created style frames to provide a more refined representation of the final visual aesthetic.
Step 3: Frame-by-Frame Animation
I used Adobe After Effects to set up the sequence and animate the turtle and plastic bottle, using the graph editor to creating more natural looking movement. Then, I used Adobe Animate to create the frame-by-frame animation for the transition. This included drawing each stage of the abstract objects as they morph into the plastic bottle at a rate of every two frames.
Step 4: Final Composition & Visual Effects
Finally, I brought the Animate files into After Effects, and applied several visual effects to give the illustration an underwater feel and match movement to the hand-drawn visual style. Finally, I rendered the project in different sizes and formats to suit various social media platforms.
