Creating the rig
Before Compositing
Bone structure
Typically, I would use very pastel based colours as I prefer the feelings these colours give. You associate bright colours with happiness and good vibes. I wanted to maintain this but also use some solid colours. I decided to use a mix of warm colours for the sky, clouds and t-shirts for the people passing by and then using solid colours on the background elements and the foreground road. This helps guide the viewers eyes to what is important, our main protagonist and the captions appearing on screen.
From a technical perspective. I used Duik Angela for After Effects. I followed the guide from @Jakeinmotion to create a rig of this character. It may not be as refined as I had hoped but it was suitable for my assignment. I then created a few copies of this character for the other members. I created shadows by simply duplicating the layer and rotating it upside down, putting a black fill on the layer, blurring it slightly to blend into the road and putting the layer connecting to the foot (where shadows naturally begin to cast).
I created the background using simple shape layers for hills, trees, clouds and the sun. I then connected every layer to the sun, this is so when the sun moves, everything else will move with the sun (saving me having to keyframe all the elements).
I used 'Bevel and Emboss' as a quick method of getting light and shadows on every aspect of the project. This is a very powerful and quick way of compositing a scene. (See image above which shows the scene before compositing).