Corn Dog-Fish

I present to you, a relaxing motion graphics loop. A concession based animation, inspired by 90's video game psychedelia, and brought to life entirely through After Effects trickery.

This one, I made purely for fun, and to see how far I could push my After Effects Skills.

Music Track: Aeon
Music by https://www.bensound.com
License code: AJP15MNLZ6VNM63G
Artist: : Theatre Of Delays

I wanted to make a relaxing, looping animation. Similar to an aquarium.
Wanting to be a bit different (and maybe a little hungry at the time) I decided to go for a concessions theme, modelling the Corn Dog-fish on an actual Dogfish.

My vision of the final thing is something trippy, if little bit soothing. Very much inspired by the special stages of the first Sonic game, and the Manta Ray tech demo from the Demo One disk that came bundled with the original Playstation.

Here's an early test. I wanted a psychedelic look to this animation, so I experimented with animated patterns among his body. I decided to abandon the idea for two reasons: 1, This was already becoming a pretty complex character rig and I didn't want to give myself double the work to do, and 2, the background is going to be filled with trippy patterns anyway, and adding patterns to the fish would make the fish disappear against it, like one of those annoying Magic Eye illusions that people pretended to be able to solve!

Originally, the strands of ketchup and mustard were going to be poured along his body from above. This would have added and extra layer of complexity, so I had them run along his body like some kind of bioluminescent pattern. I'm really happy with how it turned out.
Also, those lines behind him are the guides for his swimming pattern.

Here's a PlayStation style cotton candy. A bunch of these loop in lads will appear (and disappear) in the background of the Corn Dog-fish animation.
This is all 100% 2D, After Effects. No 3D here. I was able to pull off this faux 32 bit look with a combination of set mattes and effects.

For anyone looking to recreate this look for themselves, just apply these to your comp:

CC Block Load, Scans set to 2, Start cleared unticked.

Noise, amount of noise 4.0.

Posterise Time, Frame rate 12.0 (I'm working in 25 fps, might need to play around with it otherwise).

Turbulent Displace, amount 12.0, size 10.0

I made sure that all the elements were ever so slightly out of synch in order to give it that extra sense of unreality.

This is my little nod to the morphing birds and fish in Sonic the Hedgehog's special stages. Fun fact: Yellow and Pink are the most common lemonade colours. Huge thanks to my concessionaire consultant, Erin Urdahl for that valuable information.

This wasn't hand animated. It's all motion graphics, After Effects, trickery. That said, I did have to manipulate most of the strokes frame by frame. Probably would have been quicker to just animate it by hand.