What next?

Since I wanted my Spider-Man to live longer than one day out of the year, I decided to “immortalize him in an animation.” I thought the project would also be a good film étude to practice animation skills.

So I began to draw him more to decide what I wanted to focus on and learn from the making animation. I settled on creating a scene that combines frame-by-frame animation with motion tweened animation. It would require me to plan out drawing layers as well as use more advanced compositing.

I made a very rough character turnaround as a model and got to work.

Since the project was more about the workflow, I wanted to keep the animation simple. I set a simple scene: Spidey’s on his phone and a passing train startles his Spider Sense. Easy.

I chose to animate in Photoshop because it provides a good selection of art brushes (though the animation timeline leaves something to be desired.) The work itself was straightforward.

Once I finished all of the frame-by-frame animation in Photoshop, I took the project into After Effects for the motion tweened parts like the Spider Sense and the train. After the compositing and adding some pizzazz here and there, I finished the étude.