In Part 01, I wanted to open with a visually captivating environment that also immediately communicates a sense of loneliness on rainy nights. Apart from leaning into dramatic contrasts in the artwork, I paid attention to elements that would make the rainy city streets all the more convincing - such as the flickering of streetlights, the subtle reflections on wet surfaces, and so on.
This process was one I was most familiar with, which essentially worked like an animated illustration. I started off creating the background artwork with the camera movement in consideration. For the purpose of retaining an organic, sketchy style, I mostly stuck to using illustrations imported from Procreate as I found it hard to emulate the Procreate brush textures in AfterEffects (and Photoshop too, frankly - why are Procreate brushes so much better than Photoshop's?!).
![](https://cdn.myportfolio.com/4f105bd3-7fac-4cfb-82f0-02c54f851599/ef521fdd-9d62-4be3-9a56-519e704a019a_rw_1920.jpg?h=c38e5ebd8d1222e9e71b96e968bd33fe)
![](https://cdn.myportfolio.com/4f105bd3-7fac-4cfb-82f0-02c54f851599/9b657f61-596a-4237-9fe2-3d3ebef1ca4d_rw_1920.png?h=7c22a92931f5fc0bbf64e13e633175a4)
![](https://cdn.myportfolio.com/4f105bd3-7fac-4cfb-82f0-02c54f851599/4a8ff977-391b-42d5-bd81-dc1642d8b2be_rw_600.png?h=9f60fdd1ad0ada2d2f36b4da54b9c906)
![](https://cdn.myportfolio.com/4f105bd3-7fac-4cfb-82f0-02c54f851599/5ae8187b-e202-4b72-8e3d-0adf72b9858d_rw_1920.jpg?h=1e6d5fa4be5d003a7a23344a82acb94a)
![](https://cdn.myportfolio.com/4f105bd3-7fac-4cfb-82f0-02c54f851599/475ffee2-b1ef-44ef-b093-4a172db33de0_rw_1200.gif?h=dbc59a7d88272e4599a6bcee01cd1ffa)
![](https://cdn.myportfolio.com/4f105bd3-7fac-4cfb-82f0-02c54f851599/d097de46-3bce-4971-975c-9e7e7b71c05b_rw_1200.gif?h=48b676c9b8e6538eef980b5fc1e5de08)
![](https://cdn.myportfolio.com/4f105bd3-7fac-4cfb-82f0-02c54f851599/a2e48048-b390-4c7a-ad3b-114ffb54f6d1_rw_1200.gif?h=5c07d38780e26109b4cd18c637d5fe99)
Once I had all the elements ready to animate, I made a rough pass of the character animation to test out the timing within the sequence. I used Adobe Animate for the final pass of the character animation, where I had a separate layer for each moving body part so that I could give them individual textures in AfterEffects. The final step was to use adjustment layers and filter effects (our good ol’ hue/saturation, levels, etc.) to pull the sequence together as visually cohesively as possible.
![](https://cdn.myportfolio.com/4f105bd3-7fac-4cfb-82f0-02c54f851599/c33cea84-cc45-4a9a-982e-3c367b95b313_rw_1200.gif?h=41631fd2d84e95d5d8d43602147a9321)
![](https://cdn.myportfolio.com/4f105bd3-7fac-4cfb-82f0-02c54f851599/88384b75-fd6d-4a48-b919-40c2a96b40a3_rw_1200.gif?h=a35975dcff26f013b311cea043f9b5b8)