504 - Design for Screen - Illustrating the Bike

After spending a lot of my breaks at work playing on Illustrator to perfect my little bike and the characters sitting ontop I finally felt happy with them confirmed this still concept of how it could look - portraying that movement a blur with the wind. Now it was time to see how I could separate each layer on Photoshop and import it into After Effects to start playing with each frame for the lopped animation.. 

I experimented with using the puppet tool on AE to practise the motion of cycling, however I did find this quite tedious and difficult to get accurate in terms of the human form. I watched many videos such as the one below to prompt me, but I just couldn't get it right..

Instead I started carefully looking at each frame of leg movement whilst cycling and thought it'd be easier to create each leg movement individually and then roll them over as a GIF to create the movement - then each layer of the body can still be slightly altered on AE aswell then for added realisms. Found this looks much more realistic than the puppet tool for something as complex as riding a bike.

I individually drew each leg position as the pedals went round - 10 frames stopping at marked points around the pedal movement. I did use the same pair of legs for both characters but obviously just adjusted colours so it was hardly recognisable!

It was then a matter of aligning the legs with the rest of the body so I could create the smooth roll over of each frame on After Effects afterwards..