Simple Character Animation
Fraser Davidson · Designer / Director / Animator
A tight 59-minute walkthrough that turns a blob-shaped Illustrator character into a looping walk-cycle GIF, if you already know your way around both apps.
Simple Character Animation is a compressed, project-based walkthrough that takes one lumpy little character from a blank Illustrator canvas to a looping walk-cycle GIF in under an hour. Fraser Davidson, a working motion designer, treats the class as a single continuous build rather than a lecture, narrating each decision as he makes it. That format is the course's biggest strength and its biggest limitation at once: it moves fast enough to respect an experienced viewer's time, but it never stops to explain why a technique works, only how to execute it.
What the course actually teaches
The build starts in Illustrator, where the character is constructed from a circle split with the Pathfinder divide tool into a shirt and jeans, a lozenge-shaped head, and a baseball cap layered on top for personality. Arms and legs are drawn as strokes with the pen tool rather than filled shapes, a choice that matters later because strokes are what get rebuilt as animatable shape layers in After Effects. The file is then manually separated into head, torso, and front/back arm-and-leg layers, a deliberately manual step that sets up everything downstream.
Once in After Effects, the course covers importing the Illustrator file as a composition (not flattened footage), scaling up a 1920x1080 comp, and fixing the resulting blur with the continuously-rasterize toggle. The most practically useful segment is the rigging section: repositioning anchor points so limbs rotate from the shoulder or hip instead of the object center, parenting every part to the torso so the whole rig moves as one body, and using a pick-whip expression to make a leg's shadow path copy the leg's own path automatically. That single expression eliminates a whole category of duplicate keyframing work, and it is the kind of technique that transfers well beyond this one character.
Where it delivers and where it thins out
The walk-cycle section is where the class earns its keep. It shows the actual mechanics of a convincing loop: marking stride points with timeline markers, keyframing the torso's vertical bounce between strides, then layering in head rotation, leg curve changes, and arm rotation, each pass made less mechanical with Easy Ease and a manually pushed Keyframe Velocity influence (66 percent, then 44 percent for the arms). The trick of sliding the head's keyframes a frame or two off from the torso's, so the head appears to lag or lead the body, is a small move with an outsized effect on how alive the result looks.
The ending is comparatively thin. Adding a background color and a squash-and-stretch shadow is handled briskly, and the export path (render a QuickTime, open it in Photoshop, Save for Web with looping set to forever) feels like a leftover workflow from an older Creative Cloud era rather than a lesson in its own right.
The course's real weakness is pacing for its stated level. It is billed for beginners but never explains foundational After Effects concepts like shape layer contents, parenting switches, or what an expression is before using them, so anyone not already comfortable in the interface will be lost within the first few minutes of the After Effects sections. Treated instead as a beginner-to-character-rigging class for an intermediate After Effects user, the techniques on offer, especially the rigging and secondary-motion work, are concrete, reusable, and worth the hour.
The standout
The pick-whip expression that links the back-leg shadow's path directly to the back leg's path, so the shadow animates automatically without a single extra keyframe.
What you will learn
- Building a simple character in Illustrator using the Pathfinder divide tool and separating it into layers for animation
- Importing an Illustrator composition into After Effects and rebuilding limbs as shape-layer strokes with round or flat caps
- Rigging with anchor point placement, layer parenting, and pick-whip expressions to link a shadow path to a leg path
- Keyframing a walk cycle using markers, easing, and Keyframe Velocity to move from mechanical motion to natural bounce
- Layering secondary motion by offsetting head, arm, and leg keyframes against the torso for a more organic gait
- Rendering the loop and exporting it as an animated GIF through Photoshop's Save for Web dialog
Best for: Motion designers and illustrators who already know Illustrator and After Effects basics and want a fast, concrete method for rigging and walking a simple character.
Skip it if: Complete beginners to After Effects, since the class assumes fluency with shape layers, parenting, and expressions and never slows down to explain them.