After Effects Sprite Animation

If you watch my Metal Slug based series M.S.R.E, you will see a very radical change in skill as each episode goes on. The skill being of course the manipulation of sprites to make them look as cinematic as possible. This was always my goal with sprite animation.

I've been long gone from Flash for a while doing films and such, but I work frequently with After Effects. I decided to try and use the power of After Effects to create a much more cinematic animation than I could ever make in Flash.

Here is the result.
RESULT!

Looks great but there are so many underlying issues. That is a super compressed file and it still comes in at 7.2 mb. Back in my day you could not get away with this kind of file type. So how can I make anything substantially longer? Most likely an .flv upload.

But you can see the cinematic blur, the built in camera that let's me do all kinds of zooms, adding a nice glow to the hit. This is a path I definitely want to travel down if I want to continue to do sprite animation. I would love to create something very beautiful and cinematic that completely trumps anything anyone else is making. It's totally doable but it has its stepping stones.

This animation is something I threw together in 20 minutes. It's very basic and not super smooth. Manipulating the .gif was a lot easier in Flash and it is something I will have to work on. Let me know what you guys think!

After Effects Sprite Animation

Comments

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Dunso 2012-06-18 20:31:55

Pretty cool, the camera sweeps are certainly better in After Effects.

Dusty-Gorilla 2012-06-18 20:31:55

Indeed!

I-smel 2012-06-19 13:07:03

Yep, After Effects sure is fuckin sweet! I've never done frame-by-frame animaiton in it, I'm guessing it's not too good for that.
You're gonna have to just experiment with different ways of exporting the video to get the filesize down. I can get a minute-long 640x480 video down to like 10mb as a .wmv, but I'm not a super experienced video person.

I think you could still learn a whole lot about animating things in a way that looks good and fluid, by the way.

Trapex 2012-06-19 14:29:30

I've been thinking more and more about trying AE for animation instead of flash for sprite animation. First off, I don't THINK I would have to worry about a V-Cam or anything of the sort (unless I wanted to and will most likely use). Secondly, I do think I would enjoy a more cinematic effect for the animations that I do make.

But what would you do about movieclips and such? I mean, for the actual animation bit? Would you just make it in Flash and then put it into AE?

fadedshadow 2012-11-20 04:01:17

the animation looks pretty smooth to me but from what you said it adds a helluvalot to the filesize. i would like to see more animations from you in the future because you seem to have a better talent for it than myself. shit it's been almost 4 years since i animated anything. i feel old lol

Dusty-Gorilla 2012-11-20 04:01:17

I miss you.