I've decided to stick with simple and rudamentary for now, laying out the storyboard basics first and going back and touching things up with detail later - im not sure thats the best way to do this or not but i think so. I can always start from scratch with more detail after knowing how to do the basics (because my ae files are sort of a mess cuz im learning)

Here's the first stab at my first 'scene' on YouTube

It's rough, and i dont know where to go from here. Maybe I make this a precomp and then start my next comp on a white background with the person with the water baloon? I need help!

************************************************************************************************
UPDATE 2 - ARTWORK

Alright I've started the artwork, I have all my storyboard laid out into 8 frames. I think it'll be sort of doable. Will zoom through the art work in another night and then get to animating I think. 

Far as i can tell, it'll be best to keep the art work reasonably simple for my first pass and not focus too much on the illustration detail. keeping things grouped really well and in layers ive kept up with so far. 

First frame of storyboard

Here's the storyboard itself in 8 frames

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

************************************************************************************************
UPDATE 1 - IDEA

My idea is simple, I'll add sketches and more art in the next few days, below is my very rough storboard though.

• Tentatively, I'll have a man walk into scene to pick up his ringing phone off a desk (shaking from the vibration)
• pick it up -> 'hello?' (camera zoom into bubble of their conversation)
• the person on the other line says 'you're the best ever'
• then he drops a water balloon off the second floor
• camera follows the balloon until it hits the first persons head and splashes
• he drops his phone, and then some text falls down from the second story saying 'no you're not you suck!'

I think it'll be a nice project shooting for less than 10 seconds. The elements i think i'll have to learn a lot of will be

• puppet tool of man walking in.
• shaking / rotating / flashing of the phone ringing
• camera zooms on my canvas
• text popping up
• water balloon dropping, squish squash
• camera following down, meeting back to my first scene.
• water splashing, facial expression change
• drops the phone, bounces on the ground (maybe breaks into a few pieces)

I wonder if this is going to be too hard to do. I think for now it's a plan, and I'll start drawing it out and seeing how it goes.

I'll upload a better sketch / storyboard soon but i wanted to put this up there for you guys to see and tell me if you think it'll be too far out of my scope. perhaps I should aim a little bit shorter / easier? I really want to make the waterballoon drop with squishyness, splash. I wanna make the man walk in, pick up the phone. and i really want to learn how to use my big canvas with the camera swinging around. my 'stage'.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 ************************************************************************************************
UPDATE 0 - Learning AE (Following Dan's Tut)

Alright I don't have much to put here just yet, but I will certainly update it soon. Here's something i worked on in the meantime thanks to dans videos

I've actually never really animated anything in my life, so anything is good to me!

I'm trying to think of something to animate still. I've got a few ideas, lots of stuff to work from. But I think I'm going to want to either have a spaceman jump in a rocket and take off into space, starting from earth, to sky, to clouds, to space. or just a simple character animation of a simple shape person picking up a phone and his hand falling off or something. Nothing crazy, I want to get a solid 5-10 seconds rather than a full movie if you know what i mean.

The other idea i had was to use inspiration from adobe cmo video that came out recently

vimeo.com/62354846 and make a ball do fun things. I want simple nice smooth soft graphics.

I'll be likely trying to incorporate my style as best i can which you can see more of here at dribbble.

icecreamhater.tumblr.com is a big inspiration of mine for this project.