Phantom

A passion project to push 3D in After Effects. The hawk was modelled, rigged, and animated natively in After Effects, using nulls, Beams, and expressions. Originally planned as an exercise in faking 3D, I realised with time and effort I could create a decent forward kinematics rig and model that pushes After Effects's 3D capabilities.

Concept / Art Direction / Design / Modelling / Rigging / Animation: Jason Chow
Music: Jason Chow

Process

To build the hawk in After Effects, I placed nulls in 3D space to emulate vertices, and used expressions to connect these ‘mesh’ nulls with Beam effects. I then parented the ‘mesh’ nulls to ‘joint’ nulls to control their movement.

I originally planned ‘Phantom’ to composite the hawk into live footage. The idea evolved as development continued, and I realised the animation I wanted to portray would work best high in the sky, so live footage was abandoned.

The transformation sequence featured several VFX layers, created in After Effects mostly with displacement maps, with some particles made in Trapcode Particular.