Character experiments in After Effects

I decided to use what I had learnt in uni and see if I could get my bird character to move.
Here are a couple of experiments I tried:


bird walking from sarah chester on Vimeo.

This was just to see what my character would look like when he moved. I was quite happy with my final result but it took my a while to work out how to make the legs look normal! My character's body also moves a bit when he walks- his tail and head bob up and down. His beak also moves slightly and his wing moves from side to side. All are very slight movements that just add to the character moving because it wouldn't look good if just the legs were moving. I used the puppet pin tool to to make the tail and head move but the rest was using layers and the position and rotation tool.

I also wanted to check what my character looked like when she had to bite Doughy the Doughnut. The beak was two layers and I used the scale and rotation tool to make the beak seem as if it was opening and closing.

Bird with moving beak from sarah chester on Vimeo.