Pokemon GIF: Ninetails

My obsession of Pokemon from childhood has seeped through the cracks of my adulthood. In order to grow in your field of work, you have to constantly practice and find new challenges. By creating my favorite Pokemon in Adobe Illustrator and animating them in Adobe After Effects, I can expand my skills and still have fun doing it.

Ninetails consists of 11 layers: Eyes, Nose, Mouth, Tails (x5), Body, and Legs. I first animated the right-most four tails, then duplicated them to the left side, which left me with the 9th tail in the top center to animate on its own.

The most challenging part of this animation was definitely creating a fire blast in After Effects. I chose to take the path of the Mr. Mercury CC plugin. I split it up into 3 different fire layers (red, orange, yellow) and two smoke layers (light gray, dark gray). I duplicated my red layer 5 additional times and offset the keyframes for velocity and birth rate for the particles, giving it a layered effect.