An Animated Short: Digital Animation Final

Studying the Have a Good Trip title sequence.

The brief was open: produce a short animated piece in a week. I anchored on the title sequence of Netflix's Have a Good Trip, quick cuts, characters built from flat geometric shapes, props that morph mid-frame, a soundtrack that drives the timing. The point of the reference wasn't to copy the look but to study the cadence: what makes those few seconds feel alive is that every element is doing something, and the something is timed to a beat.

Sourcing and re-rigging from Freepik.

I pulled illustrations from Freepik that fit the visual register I was after, then opened each one in Illustrator and broke it apart, splitting limbs, wheels, eyes, mouths, props onto their own layers. Without that rigging step, an After Effects import is just a flat PNG you can scale and rotate. With it, every joint is animatable. This was most of the work, the animation comes second.

After Effects, frame by frame.

Each layer got its own anchor point, its own keyframes. Walks were cycled, props rotated, faces changed expression on accents. I treated the timeline like a piece of music, every change had to land on a beat or the whole thing felt limp. Spent half the week on rigging and source prep, half on animation and timing.