Yesterday was my day for animating waving flags. The first scene was of the Canada Convoy protest promoting mass infection. A woman in that scene stands in front of an 19 wheeler waving a small Canadian flag. Having not animated a waving flag before I looked at some youTube footage of Memorial day parades. I found a woman in the parade waving an American flag and I analyzed the footage to figure out how the flag works. The live action footage was actually too stiff a=since the flag she was waving was made of a stiff fabric. I finally animated a simple overlapping action and it worked fine.
The second scene of the day involved animating this Facebook flag in front of the Capitol on insurrection day. I tried animating the flag using a Wave Warp effect in After Effects applied to a flat version of the flag. I looked a a bunch of online tutorials on how to use Wave Warp to create a waving flag effect. All of the tutorial had the flag stiffly horizontal. Each tutorial had en move the flag to the left edge of the scene so that it could be pinned on that edge since the flag pose would stop the waving from effecting that edge. There are literally millions of possible setting combinations in the tool and I got lost experimenting all day long. When I had something halfway decent I moved it into position near the flag pole. When I rotated the flag so it would work with the off kilter pole I had drawn the flag would break apart at the edges.
I ultimately decided the wave warp tool would only be useful for the type itself. At the end of the day it took me just an hour to animate the flag by hand and paint it a solid blue. The hand drawn flag ended up looking better than nay of the versions I did using wave warp and it’s myriad of distortions. I comped the white Facebook type with the wave warp distortions over the hand drawn animation and that worked just fine. Sometimes hoping that tech can solve and issue just over complicates things.
Of course there are plenty of other flags in the scene, but I only animated the one to catch the audiences attention.