Animated Illustration - Producing Eye Catching Animation on a Time Budget!

Firsts!  - Animated Illustration: Producing Eye Catching Animations on a Time Budget!

Whether you’re promoting yourself as a freelance animator, or advertising for a company through social media, utilising moving images (such as animations) are strongly considered to generate more engagement than static images. This kind of goes without saying, but the trade off, in this instance, is needing to produce a large variety of animations to promote yourself rather than static illustrations, which is naturally more time consuming.

Walking the line between regularly updating your portfolio and socials with new work and actually producing animations for engagement/work is a hard line to walk, but, ‘Animated Illustrations’ may just be the answer and compromise to this. 

Animated illustrations are essentially animations with very limited moving parts, usually looped and drawn with as few frames as possible. The advantages of this is that the fidelity of the actual drawings can be relatively high, and only a few elements in the scene actually need to change. 

This is perfect for social media engagement and portfolio work, as it allows to demonstrate your animation skills and promote yourself with high fidelity work with much less effort involved than a fully animated GIF or short scene.

Producing my Animated Illustration

My inspiration for producing animated illustrations came from watching various youtube videos/live streams that focus on relaxing music with looping animations playing in the background. These animations often have very little moving parts, so I would define them as animated illustrations.

I wanted to produce one of these myself and create a video that used my short, looping animation as footage, while I played music over the top to fit the scene.

The scene and music I chose was a song called ‘Apotos Night’ from the Sonic Unleashed video game soundtrack, and appropriately, producing an animated illustration that is also inspired by one of the locales from the game. The rough concept for the animation was showing Sonic relaxing in this locale, picking key elements in the scene I could easily animate to create motion.

Concepting + Reference Collecting

As learned in my R&D work, concepting, planning, and collecting strong references are key before starting any piece like this. The location of ‘Apotos’ in Sonic Unleashed is heavily influenced by Greece, with the architecture being a direct interpretation. I looked for several real photographs that I could use as visual reference for my piece, which I would then stylise based on other references I took from the game itself.

This is the board I created, split into two halves; one for screenshots and concept art from the game, and the other for real life photographs that I could use as visual reference.

Thumbnailing

The next step was to do some very rough sketches in Clip Studio Paint using my visual references to see which ones I liked the most. As I learned on R&D, it’s always important to try multiple approaches to a piece before settling. 

Note - The thumbnail size I chose was 1080 x 1080, for better use on Instagram.

I presented these 5 thumbnails to peers and friends, the one on the right with the windmills being the favourite. I personally liked the bottom right one the most, but I think it’s better to proceed with the one that others preferred.

Considering Elements of Movement

With my thumbnail selected, I went ahead and took it forward into a canvas of double the size (for a higher resolution image) and set about sketching my image. At this point, I had to consider which elements of my illustration would be animated so I could future proof the drawing and not have to retroactively fix it.

I chose the windmills, the ocean, and some lamps I’m going to add to the side of these cylindrical buildings.

Sketching + Inking 

Continuing my usual illustration process, I then went ahead and took this thumbnail and rendered it into a sketch, and eventually inked it. I wasn't happy with the first one, so I chose a new reference image that I felt better communicated the perspective and feel I was going for:

Version 1

Version 2

From here I coloured the illustration, ensuring I kept my animated elements on seperate layers so I could manipulate them after the fact.

Then I just had to animate my scene, which was simple in CSP, as I just had to rotate some elements over the course of 24 frames, play it back a little slower, and it was complete!

Creating animated illustrations is so enjoyable because they let you have things both ways. You can create a piece of illustration that you're happy with, while also being able to animate it without requiring too much taxing planning or preperation. As previously mentioned, any form of moving image is far more likely to get attention through any social feeds, so pushing for this extra level of movement rather than flat illustrations can totally be worth it in terms of exposure!