TnT Tuts - #9 - Animating Illustrated Text in After Effects Using Shape Layers

In this tutorial I show you how you can create a text in Illustrator and then animate it in After Effects using shape layers. I created a text for my 2018 reel using simple shapes in Illustrator. The idea was to overlap the shaped and use different blend modes to create various kinds of color combinations. I used the plugin Overlord to import my Illustrator assets straight into After Effects and create shape layers. From there I animated the paths in various ways to create a slick animation. No real tricks in this one, just good ol' fashion keyframing.

Tnt Tuts - #1 - Character Creation, Rigging, & Animation Feat. Overlord

I just finished my first Twitch stream and I hope to do more in the future.  For this first tutorial I decided to try out Battle Axe's new extension for After Effects called, Overlord.  Essentially this extension allows to to work more seamlessly between Illustrator and After Effects.  You can send your layers, text, and swatches back and forth from Illustrator and After Effects and all of your changes will update seamlessly.  To see how I created this nifty little vampire just watch the video below.

Day 225: Space Knight

I haven't done an in depth process video in quite a while, so I thought it would be fun to do a little timelapse of Day 225: Space Knight.

As usual, this one started with a simple sketch.  I had like 6 different ideas going into this sketch and was struggling bringing them all together. Basically I wanted to take the idea of a knight and bring it into the future.  I feel like knight armor and space suits share some similar attributes. That and I'm a sucker for both space and knights.

After the sketch was scanned in I brought the art into illustrator and just went at it.  Not a whole lot to say about it.  I am enjoying getting back into illustrator lately. I've been playing in Photoshop so much that it's a nice break to just play with vector shapes.  That and I'm much quicker in Illustrator so it's a little less stressful for me.

I was pleasently surprised with how it turned out given that I was struggling so much with the initial design. Just shows that sometimes you have to keep working at something even if you're unsure how it will turn out.

Day 223/224: International Cat Day

Normally I don't feed into these "holidays" that seem to be every single day for every different kind of thing you can imagine. But a holiday that celebrates cats I just can't resist.  Here are two dailies I created inspired by the theme.


I sketched them both out and created them in Illustrator. Normally I don't use the blob brush in Illustrator that much but since I've been drawing with the Wacom more I am a little more into the idea.  The base of these characters are just vector shapes and then I drew on all the black lines.  I actually really liked the balance of clean lines and hand drawn that this process produced.

Day 219/220: This 'n That

Oh look, another 2 for 1! Yes, I've been busy with catching up on some real work and also a little lazy as well. So for that, you get two characters in one post again.

These two were actually spun from an idea I wanted to pursue with my Vimeo profile. Every profile has a banner video now and I thought it would be fun to animate a specific video just for my Vimeo banner. I knew I wanted some characters and then I thought "Hey, it would be cool to brand this somehow!" With that in mind I created some very simple characters to represent "This" and "That". I wanted to make them simple to match my brand, but I also thought that would help me focus more on the actual character animation and less on how they looked. Sometimes the simplest characters can be the most expressive. I also thought it fit the theme to make them opposites in a way (not to mention that usually plays better with comedy.)

I haven't started animating them yet. Not quite sure how I want to go about them and it will take some tinkering. Also I'm heading back to Toledo for the weekend and just don't have the time right now to mess with it. That being said, keep your eyes peeled in the futue for an update on these two.

Day 218: Apple Jacker

This daily is an example of work overlapping with this project. Occasionally I will get a new job that requires some fresh characters. No pun intended. As you can see from the mock up below, this piece has a photoshopped type of style. The apple is a photograph and the rest of the elements are just hand drawn in Photoshop. This piece calls for a lot of apple and pear characters so I made a mockup of what one might look like to test it in After Effects. If project timelines allow it, which they rarely do, it's always good to practice with an animation rig beforehand so you can spot any pain points and redesign later.

Day 217: EMP Grenade

Pixel art is something that I'm fascinated by. As an avid gamer I've grown up with this art, and with indie games at an all time popularity, there is no shortage of amazing pixel art and animation out there to look at. I've been trying to up my game a little bit just for fun. It's a serious challenge to work with, well, pixels. It takes a lot of design know-how to use just enough color and pixels to help the viewer understand what they're looking at.

I dabbled making art in the past but I always used Illustrator or Photoshop. It wasn't until I got a serious interest in making pixel art that I found out about Aseprite. After following a bunch of pixel artists on Twitter I discovered this little gem of a program. It makes it very easy to create pixel art and animation, as well as export in a variety of ways.

For this daily I created Thatcher, a character from the video game Rainbow Six: Siege. I've made Thatcher 3 times in my dailies thus far. I'm not quite sure what my obsession is with revisiting him. I really just like the design of the Siege characters. It's also fun taking something so detailed and breaking it down into its simplest form. I hope to keep making more pixel animations. It seriously is hard and takes a lot of time, but I can see myself slowly but surely getting a little better at it...I think.

Day 214/215/216: Usual Suspects

Well it's been a long time since I have written a post. Seems I didn't get better at blogging. The last time I posted was for day 38, which honestly feels like a lifetime ago. I know my history doesn't speak well for me, but I am going to try and make a post for every daily now. You can come here and read a little bit more about my process for each day. My struggles. My successes. With that being said, let's get to it.

As you can see, this daily is an example of me sort of "cheating" and doing 3 characters in one scene. For those that don't know, these dailies from from a project in which I'm trying to create a new illustrated or animated character every day for an entire year. As of today I have created 216 of 365. On rare occasions I will put a few days into one daily, but this is usually only when I get far behind. I've actually only ever done it one other time and it was when I was on vacation.

I will say that making the time is the hardest thing I deal with on this project. Some days fitting a drawing in is very easy, sometimes it comes out of work. Then there are days when I'm out with friends, busy with actual work, or just feeling burnt out. But, regardless of the pain, what I make every day generally comes out successful. And even if I don't love every piece as much as the next, I definitely learn something with each new attempt.

So, knowing I was going to put 3 characters together for this one, I thought it would be fun to put some fantasy characters all together at the bar. I started by sketching out my idea. I honestly didn't have a plan for composition when I began. I just started drawing the viking and built out from there. When I finished I noticed the archer was WAY too big in the sketch. Being lazy as I am I resigned to fixing it in Illustrator. I honestly wasn't sure if I wanted to use Illustrator or Photoshop for this particular piece, but in the end I felt the crisp shapes and lines in Illustrator would lend better to the idea I was going for.

To compliment the clean and somewhat simple shapes of the piece I decided to keep the color palette simple as well.

In the end I really enjoyed this making this one. Sometimes fitting all these characters into one scene is more fun because I can have more interaction and play around with details more. On the normal dailies it can be a little harder to do that.

365 Project: Character a Day

In an effort to do a lot of things more, I am attempting a 365 Project of my own starting right this very second. I was going to wait until the year started and do it all perfect-like, but I got bored and thought why wait. As the title of this post explains, I will be trying to specifically draw a character every day. Media will change, time spent will surely change, and even delivery may change. If I have a particularly light day I may even do a little animation. Regardless, I will do my very best to put forth a new character every day. As I said earlier, this is to get me doing things more. Things like sketching, blogging, posting to Instagram. It's very easy when you have consistent work to just do something else at the end of the day; but I want to keep my personal work thriving. I also want to grow more as an artist. I'm also at the point in my career where I could easily let myself slip, and I don't want to. There are a few outcomes I'm looking for with this project. For one, I'd like to see my Instagram get some more love. I believe, posting every single day will be a nice experiment to see how it effects my followers. I also think it's just cool to see how far you've come in a year when you do something every single day.

That's it for now. I'f you'd like to follow my progress, you can click on the '365 Project' tab at the top of my blog. Or you can follow me on Instagram at chriskolsh.

Wish me luck.

Glenn Davis - Be Honest - UNOFFICIAL Music Video

I recently had the pleasure to work on one of my first full fledged music videos. The musician in question is Glenn Davis of the band Way Yes.  At the end of this month he will be releasing his very first solo album titled Waves & Webs.  Glenn recently helped me create the music for my 2016 reel and as a fellow Ohio native I felt extremely connected to helping him create a video for his single, Be Honest.  His entire album centers around the turmoil that followed a failed marriage, so all of his songs have a shared meaning in love and loss.  Be Honest is unique in that it has a very driving beat and higher energy than his other singles.  When we discussed ideas for the music video we tossed around all things relating to what honesty is and what it means in different forms.  We landed on the idea of chameleons and their ability to shift their colors.  How this effects their ability to be honest or dishonest with their surroundings and who they are.  We took the idea a step further by having a central character who did not want to conform with the ever changing colors he is being bombarded with on a daily basis. With this in mind I took off to sketching out and developing more ideas, characters, and storyboards.

As you can see my sketchbook is very stream of conscious and rough.  I like to spend the majority of my time actually developing the art and animation.  I use my sketches as a quick way to just put my ideas on paper.  I did everything from research about chameleons to looking at all shapes and sizes of the species. Once I had these things locked down I went into creating my characters and assets.  I knew I wanted the look to be vibrant and alive to match the emotion of the song, so instead of using a clean vector look in Illustrator, I decided to use hand drawn elements in Photoshop to give everything a much more textural feeling.

Now that my assets were created, I was free to bring everything into After Effects and just get down to the nitty gritty of rigging and animating.  When rigging characters I use a program called Duik.  This is a free program that works great with setting up character rigs within After Effects.  All you have to do is label and parent your elements properly and you have a working character rig within minutes.

It's a little challenging showing all the layers in one shot, but this is what the set up looks like after the rigging is done and Duik has performed it's magic.  Basically I get a set of about 8 controls that let me easily manipulate the character in a way that makes sense.  Once this is complete with all the various characters I do all my animating.  After many hours and hundreds of keyframes you end up with the music video you see below.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it!

Blacksmith Andre Illustration and Rigging

I recently played through Dark Souls 3 and loved it. I enjoyed it so much I had to create my own animation of one of my favorite NPCs, Blacksmith Andre. I created the illustration in Photoshop and did the animation and rigging in After Effects using Duik.

Chris Koelsch - Animation Reel 2016

It's been a crazy start to the year but I've finally been able to get around to finishing my animation reel for 2016. It's always a huge weight off my shoulders to get this done. It also serves as a great way to reflect on what I've done over the past year, how I've grown, and how I want to keep growing. This year I was lucky enough to get some original music from Glenn Davis. A fellow Ohian, Glenn currently resides in Columbus, OH where he can be found playing music solo or with his band Way Yes (I highly suggest checking them out). If you want to listen to more of Glenn's personal work you can go HERE. Well, that's it for now. Check out the reel below and keep your eyes peeled for more animation in the year to come!

Foxy Walk Cycle

It dawned on me recently that I have never made an animal character before...and this is a huge problem. So I decided to work some in to my most recent project. I designed a little foxy lady and made her walk today, I was pretty pleased with the result.

Moment of Truth

This is an animation I put together for my sister for one of her midwife classes. They were tasked with making a video on the moment they realized that they wanted to be a midwife. I said, "That's cool, but let's make it an animation." So she did the writing and provided the VO while I did the animating. In the end it was really fun to take a story like this and bring it to life in a way only animation could. Getting free creative reign is something you don't find often in client work so it was fun to just let my hair down on this one and not worry if I was hitting the mark or not.



Storyboard Images

Animation Samples

Rooties 2015 Creative Excellence Award Presentation

Each year at my work we have an event where we all get together, have fun, and also give out awards to people who best represent our core values. In 2014 I won the award for Creative Excellence, which meant that it was my duty to preset the 2015 winner with their award. To do this I decided to do what I always do, which is make an animation. Had a lot of fun making a robot...I actually found that I don't do enough random characters after making this piece. It was a nice change of pace for me.

Tree City's 3rd Annual Film Festival Poster

Last year I had the joy of participating in the Tree City Film Festival with my film troupe, Bun House Films.  This year we are back, but I also had the opportunity to design the poster for the event this year. 

I was provided with a single line to inspire my design - "The root of all evil." From there my mind started working up ideas.  I looked at a bunch of other poster designs and tried to pull things I liked from all of them to create my own piece.  One thing I liked was creative use of negative space.  Obviously poster designs need room for text so this is a useful technique to create space.  I also really liked when poster designs were kept to a very small color palette.  For my poster I ended up using 4 greens based off of Tree City's main brand green.  The actual design was just my interpretation of the line I was given.  Obviously the city is known for their tree's so I wanted to tie that in as much as possible.  The film festival actually takes place in a historic train barn so incorporating that somehow was another goal of mine.  From there I just began creating this eerie and whimsical world which you see below.  I was given a lot of free reign on this design so I really just let the artwork lead me in creating the final piece. I'm happy with how it came out and I can't wait to participate this year!

Chris Koelsch Animation Reel 2014

Hello all! I come to you quite relieved to finally present you with my 2014 animation reel. If you're checking your calendar you probably noticed that we're halfway through March already. Yea...it happens. That just means this reel has a little extra juice for you. Oh, and the music was provided by the lovely Eric M. C. Gonzalez. You can check out more of his work here. Enjoy the reel!

Bun House Logo 3D

It's been a while since I've posted, but I've been pretty busy with side projects and finishing my new reel up (which will also be posted in the near future). Anyways, enough excuses. Here is my first real attempt at getting back into 3D animation since college, which for me is about 7 years. I created this in Cinema4D and for anyone who doesn't know, for a beginner, that program can be quite daunting. Luckily I had watched enough tutorials and was comfortable enough with After Effects that most of those skills carried over. Regardless it was a lot of fun to make and animate something from start to finish. I hope to do more 3D animation in the near future.

Kurt

I created this portrait for a coworker, but he said he "wasn't the biggest fan of it".

Cutting Room Floor Update #2 - Getting back into it

Alright I'm back, and a little later than I had anticipated. I got sick so that knocked me out for about a week and I also had a freelance animation that I was working on at the same time. Those are both done and out of my system now and I'm back to full time working on Cutting Room Floor (aside from my day job that is, still gotta pay for the cat litter.) Anyways, I'm still in asset and background creation mode. Below you can check out a timelapse video of me creating and rigging Professor Hoodlebrink and also a still image of the Bun House Mobile interior shot. Much more to come in the following weeks as I still plan to finish this by Halloween.