Loops and Living Holds

Thomas Beale Cipher Experiment from Elissa Boswell on Vimeo.

In this week's After Effects workshop we analysed a piece called Cipher by Thomas Beale and attempted to create an animation which took inspiration from the techniques he used.

I created a simple figure in Illustrator and imported the imagery into After Effects in order to animate particular features of the character. We used the wiggler tool in order to give an effect of erratic movement. I found this worked well on the moustache feature of the character as it gave the effect that the figure was talking behind it.

I struggled with joining some of the features together to ensure that they moved simultaneously but ultimately managed to tie the head and moustache together so that when they head moved from side to side the facial hair remained in the correct place. I just did this by dragging the spiral key to interlink the layers and placing keyframes in the correct place in order to make the movement appear fluid and natural. Unfortunately as I struggled with a few of the elements of production the imagery is not animated for the full 10 second duration. I plan to update this in the near future and hopefully create an additional animation using the same techniques which I have learned.