Testing out the Keith Haring mural animation on 2's and where this led...

 I wasn't completely satisfied with how the finished animation looked timing-wise, I thought it was actually too quick. I think the playback settings in Procreate may have had an impact on this so I decided to alter the timing in After Effects by having each drawing hold for an extra frame essentially putting it on 2's. Here is the slower version...

I shared this version with the team at our last meeting and asked which version they preferred. The feedback I received was that they liked the faster animation (shown in my last blog post) better but agreed that it would be good if the scene was longer. At this point the quick version was only two seconds in length, Heather and Eve had allocated four seconds for this scene so it was suggested that we could extend the beginning, end or both by having the background fade in to shot in sections and maybe have one of the characters continue to wave or move. 

Knowing how long the initial animation took to animate, clean up and colour I wasn't keen to do this so I developed their first suggestion to animate the background. Here is the original background I'd created in Procreate...

The first thing that struck me was there are four different colours that make up this pattern, I thought it made sense to have each colour appear on screen in it's respective groups at the same time but I didn't think this would last long enough so decided to break up the groups into sections and have each section appear in a sequence while alternating the colours, for example the mid-blue would appear first followed by the dark-pink, light-pink, light-blue and then back to the mid-blue to start over. 

This led me to consider the timing, I thought if I created ten different PNG's each containing a different section of the background colour and had them fade in at 5 frames each, that would add two seconds to my animated clip making up the allocated time of four seconds.

Here, I made a mistake due to a lapse of concentration while creating the first five of these files I accidentally left three segments of colour on each layer instead of two (I'll explain my process for creating these below) which meant I'd be short of the ten PNG's I needed. To create these pieces of the background I was duplicating the original layer which contained the whole pattern, and choosing which segments of colour I was going to keep and erasing the rest. By the time I realised my mistake I'd already completed five layers and didn't want to start over from scratch so wondered if I could adjust the timing of the 'fade in' to suit what I already had...

There are six segments of mid-blue, dark-pink and light-pink and three of the light-blue, so I calculated that if I had three segments of each colour appear at a time there would be seven layers in total. Then instead of fading each layer in for five frames I'd fade them in for seven frames, this totalled forty-nine frames and equalled the length of my original animation which advantageously worked out perfectly.

So I finished off creating these seven background layers in Procreate, these can be seen below...

I then exported these as PNG's and imported them into After Effects, dropped them on to the time line and adjusted the length of each so that the fade would start at the right point on the time line. I then searched 'fade in' in the effects and presets box and dropped the 'fade in' on to each layer one by one adjusting the length of the 'fade in' to seven frames and putting the 'fade out' to zero. Here is my first video clip of the background fading in...

 I was happy with the timing but not with the overall finished look, with it being on a black background some of the white on the edges of the coloured segments could be seen and there were also very small but visible gaps between the colours which looked a bit messy. So I went back into my Procreate file and exported a blank white background PNG the same size and dropped this below the coloured layers in After Effects. This was, in my opinion a much better finish, it hid the untidy edges and saved me having to go back and do everything again. Here is the 'fade in' on a white background...

Next I'll be experimenting in After Effects with creating a textured boil on this background.