We've loved the cracking Christmas ads from Apple, John Lewis, H&M and Sainsbury's this year, so we decided to join in the fun and create a festive-themed feature of our own.
Taking some solid inspiration from John Lewis's popular 'Buster the Boxer' campaign, I took to my favourite Adobe Creative Cloud apps to bring our very own trampolining critter to life – Zebedee the zebra!
Zebedee enjoying a popular zebra past time – trampolining!
I use Adobe Creative Cloud for all my animation work because it's easy to use. App integration allows you to switch between programs without worrying about file compatibility or loss of progress, making the transition from design to video nice and simple.
When I began the initial design, I booted up Illustrator and created each scene in 2D, making sure to keep any component I wanted to animate independently on a separate layer. Once I'd finished the 2D design, I imported the layers for each scene into After Effects and enabled them for 3D. From there I added a camera and lighting, providing some depth to the artwork.
Zebedee makes a friend...
Adobe's neat animation tools allowed me to fine tune the basics of the design, animating the camera and other moving parts, including clouds and the hedgehog. I did this using basic layer variables like position and rotation, and made use of a few expressions when I needed items to loop or react to components from another layer (expressions are a feature of Adobe After Effects, allowing you to create relationships between layer properties, using the keyframes of one property to dynamically animate other layers).
One of the great things about Creative Cloud for animation is that it supports a whole load of different plug-ins. These can be utilised to provide new tools that increase the functionality of your apps, which is great for continued efficiency and productivity, and saves you having to use other design programs entirely. When it came to animating Zebedee the zebra, I made use of After Effects' puppet tool and a third-party rigging plug-in called DUIK. DUIK allows moving parts to be controlled 'realistically', keeping appendages attached to the appropriate body part – in this case, hooves to legs and legs to body.
"YouTube are gonna love this..."
I wasn't too happy with my first attempt at texturing the snow in the garden using a vector texture brush in Illustrator, and ended up finishing the job with a third-party brush in Photoshop. Thankfully, replacing all the layers in After Effects was quick and easy and didn't affect any of the animating I'd already done (thanks, app integration!).
Once I'd completed each scene, I imported them all as After Effects compositions into Premiere Pro. From there, I arranged them on the timeline, edited the transitions and added the music. Then I used Media Encoder to export each cut for approval (I exported at a lower resolution until the finished version was fully signed off), which allowed me to continue working with Premiere Pro in the meantime.
You can check out Zebedee the zebra's Christmas debut below:
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