Night Scene After Effects

The next background/ sky that I wanted to create with After Effects was the final night-time, starry sky. After the characters have disappeared off screen at the end of the act, I wanted to create their images as constellations in the night sky, and have stars twinkling around them, with the rooftops of the town silhouetted below in the moonlight.
First, I used Photoshop top create a stylized night sky, blending texture and photo layers to achieve the desired look.

On After Effects, I imported the image, and used CC particle world effect to create stars twinkling in the sky. I created them with a 3D depth so that when I zoom out of the scene, the distance is noticeable.

I took one of the simple images that I had created of the two cats holding hands in the storyboard/ animatic. I tidied it up on Photoshop and inverted the colour, so that it looked like a white outline on black. I bumped up the outer glow of the outline level so that it looked bright.

I imported the outline layer into the AE composition. Next, I created a new camera layer and a new null layer, and linked them to each other by making the null layer the parent of the camera. I zoomed into the top right hand corner of the composition, where I wanted to constellation to appear. Using keyframes, I faded in the constellation while zooming outwards, away from the top corner to view the whole scene. I only wanted to create a very short sequence, so capped it at 8 seconds. 

I created a wiggle on the constellation to make it look hand drawn and imperfect, aimed for the sort of look that Julia Pott's characters have. I created two keyframes on the position panel of the constellation layer, and using the 'wiggle' effect, applied a small side-to-side movement to the animation. I rendered it all out and uploaded it to Vimeo.