One significant difficulty during making Nature is Beautiful is the animal movements, especially the interactions between them. Owing to the basic theory of this animation, their actions playing to each other must be filled with hostility. On the other hand they are additionally performing as natural phenomenons as well. Consequently there could not only be physical attack, strike and impact, but also deformation, burning, blowing and so on. Hence it is not enough to gain information from Muybridge's animal movement pictures.

Additionally, all the animals characters created for this video are more like abstract and geometric creature than realistic and muscular. In spite of the 3D model statement, they are acting flexibly. If their movements are all made by 3D software, they do not look as agile as I expect.

Then I reviewed a shot animation which is one of my favourite. Thought of You, made by Ryan Woodward, performs with an incredible visual method.



Then my mind was purified and I realise I do not have to stick all the characters always 3D. They are so simple that even I replace them with some simple 2D geometries, it will not be abrupt if I keep some features like colour, shape or sound effect.

This shot will follow another one with the 3D tiger and this running 2D creature is easily considered as the same one just shown with another way.

Woodward's animations inspires me a lot when making this shot. Actually I just made several masks in a single layer. With the mask animation, I can conveniently convert the shape of each mask so that to create some movements. One thing quite satisfying is After Effects can automatically create all the animation among key frames. Hence now the character animation is more various and there is more diversity to control it.