For this class, I chose to draw and animate a Castle from the city I'm living in, the Miramare Castle, as is such a beautiful place and it's part of an important moment of my life.

 

Challenge #1 The Design

I'm not proficient (or not even familiar at all to be honest) with Illustrator, so designing this art was a challenge. I used some pictures as references and opted for a simplified front view of the castle.

I also was very keen on designing some background, given that the castle is right by the ocean, and that's one of its most prominent features.

 

Challenge #2 The Preaparation

After the designing process, sorting all layers on Illustrator to export into After Effects, and creating the Precomps on After Effects was a more time demanding job. The Precompositions on AE were harder since I wasn't exactly sure how my animation was going to play out. Hence, during the animation, I struggled a little bit going back and forth with some pre comps and having to Precomp inside Precomps.

This Image is my Precomp setting at the beginning of the process.

 

Challenge #3 The Animation

 

As I mentioned before, I wasn't able to visualize the animation before I made it, so I had to "make it as I go". I also had a lot of unique elements that I couldn't just duplicate the animations and stuff, which made the process time-consuming, but gave me the opportunity to pay attention to each part of my animation.  So I went exploring with the Graph Editor for the overshoots, I had to learn how to edit a bit of Shape Layers, Masks, and even some Null Objects.

 

I ended up with this, and I'm very happy with the result, even though I'm sure that there's a lot that could be improved. But I felt proud at the end :)