Azumanga Daioh: The Reanimation Collab is a collaboration between hundreds of artists and animators to recreate the first episode of Azumanga Daioh, a Slice of Life/Comedy anime from the early 2000s. Each participant chooses a short clip from the episode and animates it in whichever style they please, with the creative freedom to enhance the shot if they see fit.
The final animation is still in production, but will eventually combine everyone's shots in sequence to result in a wacky retelling of the original episode.
Original animation from Azumanga Daioh
For my chosen shot, I animated the character Chiyo, baking something. In the original animation, we just have a loop of Chiyo stirring a bowl for about 7 seconds. I decided to build on this by adding in some more baking actions, like breaking an egg and pouring in ingredients.
I designed a new look for the character in photoshop, along with the various objects she would need to interact with. Then once I'd imported these layers into After Effects, I decided to redraw some of the components using vector paths so that I would have extra animation control, for example, on the mouth and hands.
Photoshop illustrations
Motion paths for the left and right hand movements
I used the Rubber Hose tool to recreate the arms and body so that I could control the IK movement of these particularly expressive body parts.
I wanted the video to look a bit like it had been made using cut out pieces of paper, so to make the graphics look less digital I added subtle drop shadows behind various layers, as well as adding a grain effect over everything to suggest a paper-like texture.
