As I wanted to focus more on animation instead of still art, I have decided to take an illustration, which was made the year before and bring it to life.
The original art piece was made in Adobe Animate. A problem with the first version is that it was to flat. There was barely any shading and not enough contrast. There was also a little bit of color correcting done.
For the animation, I have chosen to use multiple Adobe tools to make it. I seperated all the layers/objects inside of Animate and placed them inside of After Effects. In After Effects, I did all the movement of the objects (falling cookies, christmas baubles rolling), whereas I also made a handwriting text animation. The fire animation was reused from a previous animation project. There was a glow added in this project to get a little less stylized feel. In addition, I made soft shadows, using masks and did a little bit of colour grading. I have animated this in 3D space. All layers were set to 3D and a camera was used with a strong depth to field, moving away from the fire place to the table.