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NATIONAL HAT DAY

Hats off to National Hat Day! This funky crew is celebrating in style with a looping animation, made during my internship at Make Studio. 

Credits

Studio: Make

Design and Animation: Kiu Cheung

Supervisor: Danny Robashkin, Alec Soelle

Music: Kiu Cheung, Alec Soelle

MAKE     2025      2D     Aftereffects

PROCESS

HatDay_SF_FlowerGirl_v003 (1).png

Here are some style frames from before the animation phase. For this project, I challenged myself to design everything directly in After Effects, instead of my usual Illustrator-to-AE workflow. It actually worked out really well and saved time by skipping the need to rebuild assets later. I did simplify the designs a bit in the final animation to allow for smoother transitions.

HatDay_SF_BeretBoy_v006 (1).png
Initial Style Frames
HatDay_SF_TinyHatMan_v004 (1).png
HatDay_SF_Catepillar_v003 (1).png
HatDay_SF_Birdie_v004 (1).png
The Biggest Challenge: 
How to do an infinite zoom with different anchor points each scene?
OH those are some gnarly frames...

Sometimes there's no easy shortcut. I aimed to create an infinite looping zoom using modular methods like a 3D camera or a layered zoom tunnel, but since each precomp had a different zoom point, I landed on using a null with exponential scale and counter-animating the precomp positions. It was a gnarly process, but it worked!

Pink Poppy Flowers
Rigging

I rigged the faces of some characters to prepare them for animation, allowing for more expressive movements like blinking, talking, and subtle facial reactions. This brings more personality and life into the final animation.

Rigging.gif
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