This project was inspired by my love of 1970s imagery and how I perceive the movement of mushrooms in nature and in cartoons. I love the cute, funky, unique imagery of mushrooms and wanted to try creating my own. Adding motion to these illustrations in Adobe AfterEffects only made sense since the little “fungis” always pop up so quickly in real life! I wanted to make this animation simple, but realistic enough that the looping animation and movement made sense.
The storyboard I made for this animation was pretty simple but mimicked the progression of the size of the mushrooms as they came out of the ground, and indicated the movement of the mushrooms caps once they were fully formed.
After a while, I decided to focus more on the mushroom movement. By the time I finished my animatic, I had abandoned the day/night sky sequence. Once I decided on that movement I created my assets in illustrator, and experimented with different shapes and colors of mushroom stems and caps. I added variation among similar shapes to add some consistency.
I eventually decided to add movement to the grass with the puppet pin tool and sun after some feedback which allowed the scene to be a little more lively, and so the mushrooms didn’t seem so out of place.
The wobble of the cap also came from suggestions on how to complicate this animation in subtle ways that would appeal to more fun, creative ways to animate that gave my assets a little more character.
This animation mostly dealt with the scale feature, and tweaking each one so it had a more unique, “random” movement, as mushrooms would in nature.
My main problem at this point was the duration of time the mushrooms took to form and shrink, and how long they stayed at full form. When they shrunk I also realized that the timing was far too similar among all of the different mushrooms.
After receiving more feedback, I decided to add more keyframes at 100% size close to the 0% keyframes, and place them more randomly throughout.
Once I figured out the movement I liked, I copied and past the first keyframes of each item to the end of the sequence and looped it, so that they would grow and shrink in a constant loop. The sequences don't exactly copy each other, which I did intentionally so that it mimicked a more random, natural pattern than a robotic animation.
Although simple, this final version of my animation is cohesive through both its assets and movement. I eventually decided to make the sun movement subtler, it overpowered the animation a bit. The movement that was added made sense in the scene. It is executed well in the actual design/imagery through my use of color palette, light/shadow and line (or lack of it, due to the intentional lack of stroke on my shapes). I paid attention to detail in all parts of the animation and illustration so that it all incorporated into one complete scene.
