I recently took an assignment to create a looping animation in After Effects with the following directions:

-it must look good as a still

-it must have movement

-it must loop

-it must contain at least one pre-comp

-it must be at least 30 seconds exported (looped or full animation)

I began my process with sketches. 

It's always a little bit of a challenge to narrow things down to what I want to create. I thought about building a burger or having a guy blow bubbles from his bubble pipe. I considered making a firecracker and several other items. I felt drawn to a skeleton and a wolf. My sketches began to take shape a bit more! This took a few iterations, but eventually I wound up at this:

It's a bit about a skeleton who loves a wolf. Trying to figure out After Effects in a couple of weeks was a bit daunting. I didn't feel like I would realistically be able to figure out all of the functions to create a running wolf in this piece, so I decided to make the wolf into a rocking (wolf) horse.

This was my first draft of the animation:

In critiques, I was encouraged to add some outlines to the rocking portion of the horse and liven it up  a bit. I decided I would also try to do more than just some plain lines on the skeleton. So, I put lines on everything! 

It was also recommended that I give the wolf some ears, so I did that and thickened up some of the lines on the skeleton. Here's my completed animation:

I fulfilled all of the requirements for this assignment. The main image looks good as a still, it has movement, it loops, has at least one pre-comp, and runs at 30 seconds. It was a lot of fun, and I'm excited to do more in After Effects. I may try something a little more simple next, to try and learn what all of the functions are in the program.