Pokemon GIF: Gastly

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.

Gastly consists of 5 basic parts: Eyes, Head, Gas, Gas Trail, and Mouth. I first designed each element onto their own separate layers in Illustrator, then imported the .ai document into After Effects. The biggest challenge was animating the Mercury CC effect perfectly with Gastly's body. This emitter plugin has a mind of it's own sometimes, and getting the gas falloff to end right before the GIF looped was more inconvenient than I had planned.