Using Adobe After Effects.

One of my first experiments was to use After Effects to build my character in a cut-out style. Firstly I had to create my assets (I chose to draw them by hand and scan them in) then cut them out digitally and on individual layers on one .psd file.

After that it was a case of dragging the .psd into After Effects, then from there I started dragging layers down onto the timeline.

With each asset I dragged down, I had to rescale them and set the pivot points like so:

Eventually with my character set up, I could parent-child my layers together. All the hands were parented together, then parented with the lower arm, which was then parented with the upper arm, and so on. This means that when I needed to change hands or body angles, the pieces were already in position.

After all of my assets were ready to use, I changed the colours of each section so that they were easy to differentiate on the timeline. Then I started going through some simple motions, moving only the body at first but adding a size increase in addition to the movement.

A method I used to switch out hands/faces was to modify the timeline and layer visibility.

For longer sequences I'll need to create compositions, but considering this was my first real attempt at After Effects I was quite pleased with the result. Video upload should come soon!