Writeup - Animating My Digital Diorama

This is my first attempt with animating in Adobe After Effects. I'm really excited about this project because I have wanted to know how to do this for a LONG time. As I started working, i realized how important my notes were (im happy that i took good ones), because i forgot a good bit of details. This seemed so much quicker and easier in class. Anywho, i went back into my photoshop document in order to merge a few layers that didn't really need to be separate. Then I went back into After Effects to do my animating. It got easier as I played with it and im pretty happy with where it's going. The scene starts with us seeing only the background sky and the ground in the front. The hills then rise into position. Then the trees will pop into their place. Leaves grow on trees then fall off.

Digital Diorama- Assignment 1 writeup

From the jump I knew that I wanted to deal with textures for this project; it was the first thing that popped into my head. I found some artificial leaves and decided that those would be my objects of choice to animate. I didn't go with too many leaves because i thought it might distract from the rest of the scene. I went with the scene of the last leaves falling during an autumn sunset. I personally think autumn is the best season of the year: it feels great outside, the colors outside are gorgeous, and my favorites clothes are all meant for the season.
I started by scanning in the leaves. I used the texture of the brightest leaf as the background sun. for my hills, i scanned the sleeve of my jacket: played with the distances by varying the closeup of the stitching. For the trees i used the texture of the mousepad and I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. im not one hundred percent sure i did everything correctly when it came to image sizing, but i think its okay.
I have played with adobe AE before, but this will be my first time using it for animating so im pretty excited to learn how all this works.

I really got into making this diorama and there's some more elements that I would like to later add to this piece.