After Effects: Final Project

For our final project of the year from Sara, we were set a collaborative task to put together 22 videos all made by each person in our class, which, when played together, would show sea creatures swimming in and out of the frames and would make one consecutive piece. Since being absent from the character After Effects project, I initially struggled with coming to grips with making my animal have individual layers on a PSD document. I chose an Axolotl - thinking this would be easier to do as it just swims along. I use block colours and went over a base image in Photoshop, separating out each layer.

I learned throughout the entire process to make the image as simple as possible, as I found it really difficult to subtly move the legs without showing where I'd cut around the older image, so it didn't look quite as realistic as I intended - I chose to make the animal blink, and instead worked on things that would make the piece more realistic instead of re-doing the animal; this involved me generating bubbles on After Effects and using a layer to create the light shining into the sea. This made the whole piece a lot more realistic.

When creating the moving Axolotl, I chose to create something very fluid and give the animal some life by making it move, the animal needed to be "scared" by something because of the jerky movement half way through. I then created more bubbles to generate, and added fish quickly made in Photoshop and used key frames to move it along.

Overall, this utilized all the skills I've learned in After Effects so far, it didn't take as long as initially expected, so was able to add a lot more effects and spend more time focusing on the smaller details. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, however I probably would have used more detail on the animal itself and fixed the issue with the legs not being able to move as far as I'd have liked, as he looks quite still/frozen. The overall presentation at the end was really interesting for me to see as it was nice to see everyone's styles come together.

After Effects: Camera Positioning

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.

After Effects: Kinetic Typography

Our next After Effects workshop was on the focus of typography. The brief was to bring in a font and information regarding the font; I selected Coolvetica, a spin on the font 'Helvetica', which is more rounded than the original. 

My focus was to try to be creative with my simple font, I chose to create an effect where the font looked as if it was being typed out simultaneously on the video - this was created by me manually changing the timing on each letter and moving the line along to create the effect of someone typing. Although it was a little tedious, I think the effect of the typing worked really well, it can also be improved by adding audio of someone typing along to it.

The next thing we were taught upon was to change the way the text transitioned in the beginning. Through using the CTRL button we were able to easily navigate around the time line, and using the position tool (by holding 'P') able to create time stamps of where the text would come from. By changing the position along the timeline, I could make the text sort of fly in different directions, which I did different ways for different effects. 

By having it come in different ways for the '1970' text, it created the appearance of "rolling in" - additionally, by using effects on the movement, such as blurring, it made the effect look like it was coming in more quicker and helped to support the rolling appearance.

I wanted to keep the focus intentionally on the font transaction, so chose to keep the colour scheme predominately black and white with a hint of blue colour. I kept the background also simple for this reason, choosing block colour over more complicated graphics.

From being my first attempt I'm quite pleased with how professional it looks, particularly with the font I chose and being able to learn heaps about text transitions that are quite easy to do. If I'd have gone back to improve, I would have made more complicated effects and made it look more visually interesting by improving the textures/background. Overall this session was really interesting for me and I learned a lot, despite taking an hour to work on my own thing.

After Effects: Speed and Motion to Character

The next After Effects production session was one that I'd really looked forward to. Our task was to create a character, in illustrator or photoshop, retaining the layer and layer sizes and then import the character into After Effects. We'd then proceed to animate the character, around the legs, face, tail etc or any parts that would make the character 'come to life.'

I chose a flamingo trying to keep it as simple as possible. Although I thought I'd selected quite an easy animal, when animating a 2D object it can prove quite difficult - we first had to make sure we'd keep the layer options and draw out each body part in separate layers, so we could easily animate each object without having to go through the process of destructing a flat image; I named them to make it easier on me to know which one I was animating. The process of importing the image was easier than I'd expected, we just had to select the option to retain the layer style.

I came up with many different obstacles when trying to animate my animal. Firstly, when moving the legs in the slightest way, it would show the gap where I'd tried to cut out the leg quickly, meaning that even the slightest movement exposed a gap in the leg of the animal, so the leg would have to be animated either very quickly or to not much of a big degree. The second thing was making the animal look realistic in its movement, depending on which animal would depend on how it would look when moving, so I had to research this in hindsight to make sure I could move the legs without it looking too stiff. This was one of the harder challenges for me, and although it's not perfect, I tried to make the animal look its best without revealing any gaps or errors I'd done.

Overall, I was really pleased with how my character came out, although really not perfect, it was nice to get to grips with animating different sections of the same composition, and bringing to life a character which I could use in later projects throughout my course.

 

Workshop Week

Our workshop week was open for us to be able to for one or two days start and finish an entire project. I selected Wednesday's workshop session with Sara, creating an motion graphics Christmas Card with other people to place together in harmony for a video for the university.

For my card, I wanted to do something that was more personal to me, and to show off my skills in Photoshop. I took about making the card very complicated in design, in comparison to other people who stuck to making the animation more complex; My initial planning was to create something with subtle animation in, such as snow falling or the breathing of the fox I incorporated.

Although I wasn't able to finish this due to illness, I still really enjoyed the project and the start I made to it, I was inspired through pinterest ideas and my own likeness for things to create this. My idea was to create a few different frames and animate them subtly on after effects, possibly focusing on the text, fox, and some snow that I would add, as this would work better for my design than anything else.

After Effects: Novel 2

James & The Giant Peach

To conclude my introduction to After Effects, I finally placed together my frames from Photoshop into After Effects, a software I was completely new to.

The introduction to the software proved quite time consuming as I'm quite used to using Photoshop and image editing software, the comparision between the two was hugely different to what I was used to. Although I've experimented on Premire Pro, Movie Maker before, a lot of this was trial and error, as seen in my video.

My overall reflection of the video I created was that as the video progresses, it does develop in skill. My expectations of myself, and thus the video, meant I was required to Google search a lot of the steps needed to progress in the video. An example of this can be seen in the "a novel" section - I wanted the transaction between frames to be smoother and at a quicker frame rate, so I took about learning how to use effects (CC Wipe etc) on my own and how to apply them. This also granted me access to a lot of shortcuts, such as pressing "T" to view Opacity levels on each frame.

This took an incredibly long time to do, as we also had to get to grips with completely new software and produce a ten second video with audio. I obtained audio from the Youtube Audio Library, which provides free copyright audio; I sifted through to more positive/upbeat audio to reflect the novel and it's upbeat pace.

The video itself I'm not entirely happy with, however for the first attempt I feel I've learnt a lot from researching and listening to Sara. It's not 100% perfect, with particular focus on at the end, but I also took a lot away from the session and introduced myself to After Effects.

After Effects: Novel

As an introduction to After Effects, we explored From Form - a design studio who makes short films and motion design. Their video was filmed using both digital and hand-crafted work; the transactions were eye-catching, colourful and humorous whilst getting to the point.

 For our own project in After Effects, I chose the novel James and The Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl. The aim was to make a 10+ second clip using over 10 frames for a short summary/intro to the novel. Created in Photoshop, I focused on orange as the primary colour. My focus on transaction effects was for them to be quite choppy and relevant to the novel (the peach and the ladybirds across the screen),

Saul Bass's Posters

My work felt very similar to Saul Bass, who was an graphic designer most famous for this style of work, which was based around silhouettes and simple, colourful layouts. The minimalist style is still eye-catching and Bass used shapes and text in a creative way which would clearly display the plot of the film. After I'd researched him, I decided to incorporate this into my work, by adding textures and playing with layer styles more.