The Full Process

The original drawing is by Minland4099 on Devian art

(Note: I did the animation, not the art)

Here are all the different layers I had to cut out from the flat 2D image above. Then had to repaint what was hidden behind the sections, such as the background which was heavily repainted where things used to exist, to become a full background once again. This was done using tools such as stamp tool, healing tool, manual paint brushing, and intelligent space aware fill.

Then the elements were imported into After Effects as a PSD file to maintain positions, layer names, transparency, and sizes. This also allowed me to make quick changes to the Photoshop file which would immediately reflect the result into After Effects

For the front right jellyfish that has the most movement, a circular movement animation was implemented (4 keyframes), and then an additional wave deform was added on top, and I had to calculate the Sin wavelength in order to have a perfect looping animation. A similar tactic was used with all the other jellyfish in the scene, just with different values.

For the hand, the puppet warp feature was used, in After Effects the pins that are created can be keyframes, and that was the technique used, the shoulder pin and the elbow pin were static, and for the hand, a looping movement animation was made.

The hair movement combines all of the above techniques since I would like the hair to look flowy with the ocean's current, but I still need an anchor point which is the head. First, the puppet warp animation was done with different points of all over, and then a wave deform was applied, with a pinned position of where the wave would start from was made.

Lastly, the fish animation was a spline path hand-drawn to finish off the overall motion that I wanted the eyes to follow. then I applied all 18 fish to follow the spline path, and with a bit of tweaking the delay between all the fish and different positions, it created a natural feeling movement that simulated real fish I have studied on Youtube and their movements as a pack. And one more addition was another wave deform because fish swim!

GIF render was done using https://ezgif.com/ because honestly, it is the best and most featureful gif maker that's out there