The cape was hand drawn because I wanted a buldge at the beginning of the cape that peters out, doing it via effects made it look very unnatural, and it was much faster just hand drawing what I wanted then fiddling with effects all day :).

 

There is also another set of drawings when he is kneeling and a new set of cape drawings were made. In the kneeling stage I did not want the silhouette of the wolf in the cape to be too obvious, only when he stood does it become more evident.

 

A lot of inbetween animations like going from kneeling to standing was done IN after effects just modifying shape layers to create the effect. Animated on 1s (every frame). The cape itself was animated on 4s (once every 4 frames). It works because of the turbulent displace effect,  making the cape feel hand drawn on each frame.

 

I will create a much longer version, since this goes by so quickly. Was restricted since it was only supposed to be an intro to an opening credit before the titles are shown. The mistake of many other intro videos is they spend 15 seconds on the intro, after the 10th video in a series it drives viewers to distraction. My rule of thumb for intro's nothing longer than 4 seconds.