Liam Nunn, an artist and professional animator who came to do a workshop on how to use digital animation in Adobe After Effects using a rig he made an setup. He made a face of a lady which we could animate, and the whole animation would be 5-10 seconds.

This is the basic default rig/template we started with, it didn’t move, as it isn’t animated yet.

This is what it looks like in Adobe After Effects with all the keyframes to make everything move.

The small boxes on the left control what the facial features do, so we had the keyframe the small dot in the different boxes to move the corresponding’s elements for the face.

The different sections on the timeline were colour coded to help separate from what we should add key frames to and what should be left alone.

To make an element move you have to add a keyframe to where you want the action to finish on the timeline, then change the X and Y values.

To change to colour of an object, you just have to open all the collapsed folders until you find the “color” section, then click the colour box and drag it to the colour you want, and click OK.

This is what I created. I changed the colours of the features and made the animation loop by making the end frame the same as the starting frame. Overall, It lasts 9 seconds, and I used lots of key frames to make the character look in every direction possible, blink, and move. I exported it in the format H.264 and then compressed it to have a low quality, which allowed me to post it on the blog.