Hypercinema Week 05 - Expressions in After effects
- Oct 5, 2025
- 2 min read
While thinking about this week's homework I had a few After Effects expressions ideas in mind that I wanted to test:
A random expression - the idea was to make a stary night scene in which all of the stars will twinkle randomly after assigning "seedRandom" to the glow effect intensity.
creating a "broken clock" that decides to act out creating time disorientation. I was planning to achieve that with the time expression making the different time hands in different directions and time by multiplying the time expression with a negative value of 360.
The last one was the wiggle effect - at first I wanted to use it to animate the reflections on the pupils of a pair of eyes. eventually it didn't happen but idea made me come up with the story board for the short animation I did. I did use the wiggle effect to emphasize the stars twinkling and to portray the excitment of the rooster (since I am only able to create very basic animations).
eventually I combined the three to create a short animation. I thought it would be a good practice for the midterm project - sketching a storyboard and practicing a bit of animation and editing in the attempt to convey a clear story.
I started with sketches for the main character (the rooster) and the storyboard:
The story slightly changed along the way when I realized I can improve it in different points, but it was a good starting point and gave the project some structure.
This is the star of the movie in it's sketch version:
I was designing the charachter and the environment mostly with quads and tried to keep it as simple as I could but at the same time make them look appealing.
I used different elements like gradient and noise to give it more volume and an organic feeling.
Because my lack of animation skill I planned to convey a major part of the story through the composition - backgrounds, colors "lighting" and staging, as well as through sounds.
Luckily I ran into the sound archive of the BBC which was very helpful and provided all of the sounds for the project.
Here are some screenshots from the final output:
And here is the full movie:
