My next workshop with After Effects took our skills to more of an advanced level; namely, we worked on generating the effects we created in previous lessons and stylizing them differently and making them look more complicated. In this lesson was the focus of using the camera tool to have the text/or other objects zoom in or out, move to the left or right, giving more of a 3D definition to the work than before.
We learnt how to use the camera tool on individual layers - by making them 3D objects by clicking on the small box near the 'fx' option, it would allow only the layers that were selected to be effected by the camera. You can also edit the amount of cameras you can have and create them on separate compositions if you want to overlay them all.
Inspired by Troye Sivan's "Wild" lyric video which involves yellow petals falling down on a cascade of lyrics, I took his other song from his new album, "Talk Me Down" as the pace was a lot slower than wild and I could work on using the camera tool at a slower pace. The intro and petals were created using the generate tool, and then I used an separate camera to make it sweep in at the end. Instead of changing the colour on the same layer I just duplicated the petals falling and changed the colour so they could alternate colours in a more slower transaction than sharp colours, which is what I envisioned more when listening to the song.
The colour changes are inspired by the video too, and work well together.
I also wanted to alterate the camera position on the text, so created that as a 3D layer and pulled the 'Z' axis on the camera forward so the text would jump out. When using the camera positioning tool you have to reset it otherwise it'll remain as zoomed in as you want, which I didn't want for the next layer.
Over all this was a really simple process but worked so effectively at creating what I wanted, although it took a while to get the hang of I now use the tool a lot and value it as it brings something else to a video which would otherwise be quite 2D.
