![]() ![]() I then applied a simple "wiggle position" effect with a speed of 1 and a radius of 30 pixels. I scaled down the bird composition to around 12% - 20% so that it would fit within the sky of the chosen backdrop. I then created a new composition (called "bird_flock") and placed my single bird animation into it. In this instance, the expression loopOut(type = "cycle") basically means "at the end of this animation, go back to the beginning and play it again!" By holding alt and clicking on the stopwatch of any parameter you can apply an expression - a bit of code that allows far greater control over those particular keyframes. Setting the animation to loop using an expression ensured that I could shrink or lengthen the clip as much as I liked without effecting the loop. I could have simply repeated the keyframes to achieve the same effect, but if I wanted to lengthen the clip I would have to keep duplicating the keyframe. ![]() The next thing to do was to get the animation to loop continuously so our birds will flap across the sky. I put together a really simple animation to test the idea. We could then simply keyframe the position/scale of the birds so that they appear to fly towards the screen. I thought that if we were to create a simple flying cycle of one bird, we could simply duplicate it multiple times and offset the position/beating of the wings so that the birds fly at different speeds, creating a fairly realistic impression of a flock of birds in flight. I took a lot of inspiration from the above video, in which the author claims the birds were created using a random particle generator system (presumably in some 3D software such as Maya) - this is a bit beyond my scope, but looking at it set me on the right track. ![]() I'd had a few ideas on how this could be achieved relatively simply using After Effects and decided to put together a small test to better get an idea as to how it could potentially be done. One of the earliest things mentioned whilst we were developing the script was the potential difficulty in animating the opening scene where the flock of crows overhead towards the camera. ![]()
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