Creating a textured boil for the background of the Keith Haring mural animation...

 Following on from my last post about dividing up the background into sections and having each section fade in to the shot one by one, next I wanted to experiment with adding an animated texture to the different colours as suggested by my lecturer Kieran. He very helpfully sent me a YouTube tutorial video by Ben Marriot walking you through the process of attaching a grainy texture to a shape layer in After Effects and making it boil. I'm not at all very technical and to be fair struggle a bit when it comes to using software in too much of an advanced way but I followed along as best I could and was pleasantly surprised by the outcome.

The first thing I did was work on some practice tests on just one area of the background, going through the process several times playing around with the settings until I'd found a combination I was happy with. My intention for this was to try and replicate the highlights I'd added in Procreate and bring them to life, so I chose shades of each colour that were as close to the highlights as possible.

In a nutshell, you create a new shape layer above the layer you're working with, then using the pen tool create the initial shape in position. Go to Effects/Channel and select Set Matte making sure the shape layer you are working with is selected next to the 'Take matte from layer' option. Then search 'roughen edges' in the Effects and Presets box and drag this onto the shape layer. You can experiment with different Edge types but I went with 'Roughen' and then change both the Border and Scale to suit the look you're going for. Then finally, to create the boil, you select Evolution Options and hold Alt and click the stopwatch to open up a text box in the timeline where you type: time* followed by a number. In the tutorial he was using 4 but I found this to be too slow and went for 8 which was faster and more lively.

Here are some examples...

In the above I set the Border to 150 and the Scale to 50 and used the time code 'time*4' and as I mentioned above, it was far too slow. Below I've used the same settings but changed the time code to 'time*8'...

The speed was much better but I didn't like the hard line that was still visible so I tried to find out if I could do this method using the paintbrush but was unsuccessful so in the end I decided to try and create more curvy and organic shapes at the start of the process. Here's an example...

This was still not good enough so I changed the Border setting to 200 and the Scale to 30, this seemed to do the trick. Once I had reached this stage I then went on to create individual shape layers for each of the sections that were fading in, the result was quite varied but overall I'm happy with it. Here it is...

I will share the final video clip showing the background and animation in a future post.