For our video, we wanted to add some cartoon animations to add to the story line, but also include an eye-catching effect that would memorable to the viewer.

THE PROCESS

To create the animations, we used After Effects, Illustrator and Anime Studio 8. First of all, we had to create the silhouettes of our cowboy and cowgirl. We drew this on a graphics tablet through illustrator. To be able to move our cartoons, we had to draw each character in separate parts, to then be built up as an animate-able ‘puppet’, in Anime Studio.

PARTS:


FINAL CHARACTERS:
   
For the horses, and creating genuine movement, I traced the famous Muybridge horse run cycle. This consisted of 12 images that we then looped to keep the horses running.   

Finally, we had to create a desert like background. We created some layers on photoshop, after watching some reference material. The sky layer would remain static, as it was the furthest away. The distant mountains would move slowly, and the ground would have to move quickly under the horses hooves. These are the layers we created:

And this is a screenshot of the final result in the music video. We added some more features in After Effects like a pop-art overlay that flickered, some camera shake, and lens flare sun. The process above was done similarly for the animations in the intro of the video.