Snack time - making progress

Yesterday's full day session proved to be very effective.

I made a bunch of test movies to see them in real time and to give myself reference points of where to animate.

I made null joints on all the puppets and animated a variety of short loops to be tweaked and added to other compositions. Still works in process you can see some of the progress I made on my animation.

Here is a rocket ship made up of the body with a wiggle parameter on the scale and position property. I added the three tubes to the bottom and anchored them to a null object at the centre of the rocket ship body. Each flame is parented to each respective tube. The flames have sine wave effects put on them. The eyes of the character are anchored and have a different wiggle parameter on them. Later I will animate the rocket flying across the sky with a plume of smoke following the motion path behind it.

Here is a pink plane made by drawing, scanning and slicing up many parts in much and then assembling in After Effects the same way as the rocket ship above. I may make a new propellor and just have it flash on and off rather than how it is now. At about 15 seconds in there is a trap door in the back that opens and will drop some bombs over the landscape in the animation.

Here is a humpback whale that I animated that I will have floating up into the sky pulled by an air balloon and finally being dropped down into a movie theatre and squishing the the words "the end" or onto "intermission". I created null objects in the tail then put puppet pins on their left corners then used this piece of code as an expression for each:
n=thisComp.layer("name of null object") 

nullpos=n.toComp(n.anchorPoint);fromComp(nullpos); 

In this way, each pin on the object layer is attached to the named null object. I then created a hierarchy of the null objects by parenting them from one to another so that when I rotated one the others are affects along the hierarchy.