Snowy City Scene Animation

Good morning everyone!

Today I am sharing a rough animation I have created. I created this scene for my annual Christmas card and animation.

First I drew all the buildings and the train in pencil, scanned them, and colorized & knocked them out in PhotoShop. Next I rendered an animation(quicktime movie) of each one, then I took all those quicktime movies into After Effects and rendered each one with snow falling. On each piece of my "set", as they go further back into my scene I added a little camera lens blur, I did all of this to add to the depth of the scene.

I'm really disappointed with the compression on this. It looks SO much better on my computer here at home. Maybe some day I will find the right settings, that will make a clean and clear video that is small enough to upload from my connection here at home. I will try to replace this video at some point with a version that has better compression settings. Also, I'm not sure why but the animation is cropped. I created a 16x9 animation and this is not as wide as it should be. If you want to see it un-cropped go to my Vimeo page and view it there.

Next I will add riders on the train, and people in some of the windows in the apartments. Some of them will be animated, just a little. I'm only one person and I only have until the end of November. This animation was a huge first step though, proving I could create the look I wanted.

One thing that I needed to learn how to do again (because it had been two years since I did it last) was how to create a snow effect in After Effects. I watched this tutorial by Carlo (sorry if I spelled that wrong) on YouTube. The best thing about the internet is people sharing knowledge, helping each other out. His turorial was quick, concise, and he showed and described everything he did. Very helpful. Thank you to Carlo.

I hope you enjoyed this project, I hope to post a couple updates as I work on this over the next couple months. As always feel free to leave a comment, and to share this post with others. I hope you all have a terrific day, and thank you for stopping by.