The primary focus of the testing phase was to establish a workflow and ensure that the idea was viable with the technology and techniques I had at hand.
First, I checked to see if the animation style would gel with the audio quality recorded by my personal camcorder. I had shot my work experience film with it, and so lifted some audio from said film from my archive. Then, I reused (and slightly updated) the model I created for last year's Consolidation project. After cutting some of the audio together, I animated the model and the result can be seen below.
Animation warmup from Ashley Watts on Vimeo. Password: cpr4
With that established as the method of recording, I set about finding the best workflow for the animation. I attempted to use After Effects as a method of taking designs direct from Illustrator into animation, rather than using the rather awkward workaround of my usual animation program, Anime Studio Pro 7.
However, I found that support for easily importing Illustrator files into After Effects was one of the major additions in CS6, while I have the CS5.5 Creative Suite. Thus, importing Illustrator files are such a laborious chore (you have to recolour-in all the shapes when importing to After Effects, as seen in the above screenshot) it was actually simpler to just use Anime Studio Pro.
With my prior knowledge of how to export videos from ASP with an alpha channel, so the video can be laid over footage in Premiere Pro, I had my pipeline sorted. Aside from some doodling in Illustrator to get an idea of the design of the characters, all design work was undertaken in ASP, since ASP's Illustrator compatibility is barely functional. Then a transparent-backed video is exported, where it is synced up to the film proper in Premiere.
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