Exercise 6 Final piece.

Again I decided to try animating to music again. This time selecting a much more crazy track to animate to, so I would need to put a lot of energy and movement into the animation. Which proved to be pretty difficult.

First off I got a little plan inside my head, I knew what i wanted to each little bit, and there are 3 parts to it. The dog face, warning sign part and the machinery bit. I drew up all the artwork and started to animate to the music!



Timing was something that was made VERY hard as my computer took ages to create a preview! But I dealt with it by decreasing the preview quality and it ran a lot quicker. But I didn't figure that out untill I had almost done...

The parts that took the longest were the cogs, oh my goodness... I wanted to mask the top so that the green highlights and the shadows would come through, whoch worked. But I also wanted to mask the layer below which had the colour and shadow on, the follow the motion of the lines above. As i wanted to have the highlights more on a few teeth at the top, and for that it would need to be masked with the motion otherwise you would see it appear between the teeth. I spend around 5 hours in total trying to get this to work, In the process I found that if you update the photoshop file, it up dates in aftereffects too! Which is great. In the end I realised it wasnt worth it and added little green highlights to all the teeth on the motion layer. It worked pretty much just as well...

The Warning sign part went pretty smoothly, apart from being very tedious! I dont know why one of the layers went a bit crazy when i pre composed it all though. I couldnt fix it as to be quite honest, I didn't have the time. I needed to render it and I didnt check it before hand. I quite like it though, its a mistake which annoys me but after getting a second opinion i feel a lot better about it. They said it adds to it.

The dog face was really fun to animate. the bottom jaw was going to be puppet pinned but I could NOT get that to work properly without distorting something that didnt want to be distorted! The top snort was fun to expand and shrink to add depth to the face. Each snarl line is an individual layer too.

The typography was again, the best part to do and I recon it really adds to the whole thing! I do enjoy putting a strobe effect on there too.

This film would be shown at a nightclub or behind a DJ. Thats why its so full of movement, abstract and why is has so much strobe. Its purpose is to reflect the energy of the music. The cogs and gun part didnt get as well as i had hoped... It needs more power to it.

I cant help but think it needs more. Maybe I could add some distorted video effects and camera movement in the future to make it REALLY insane. But for now i'm leaving it as this. Pretty happy with it!

Exercise 5 Puppeteering!

This lesson was rather interesting! We learnt how to use the puppet tool, a very strange looking effect. It turns your image to rubber at first, but using the starch tool would stiffen parts. The real time recording was good too, where i could move something around and it would record it in real time!

So I had a little play with this space scene we were given. I made a little fight scene. The man is completely real time animated, limb by limb i did it. I tired to make it look like he was hitting something with his arm. The space thing was animated using the transform stop watches. I had a great fun doing this untill it got to the... legs... I did NOTHING different to the front leg, it was even on the same layer as the back one... But as you can see on the video it went completely insane for some reason half way through!

I decided to leave it in as an example to myself, check your timeline as you animate. I just animated straight ahead and didn't use the playback to check. We were told this didn't have to be amazing too. So i rendered what I had and cracked on with my final 15 seconds film.

Exercise 3 Motion tracking.

This one was very difficult to follow and I couldn't really make sense of tutorials. I kept on getting lost and confused. I got it to work in the end though! And i made the robot move with the footage. It took me a while to find a good spot to track though. Everyone kept telling me to use a black spot of the path but it didn't work as well as it could. So i spent about half an hour trying out different places to track. Eventually, i got it it to work as well as it was gonna get.

One thing i dont understand is.... the toes of the robot track better then the back of the feet on the heels.  If you look, he is sliding on the back. I have no idea how to fix that because in the actual footage, if he was there... he would be turning. The camera is panning to face him so you would see less of the heel and he is 3D. So I have no idea how that would work.

I had a go at making the fire apear in the sink hole and tracking the hole... but it all got a little to complex and I was making silly mistakes. I was happy with my attempt at tracking so I left this as it was. I found this kind of thing doesn't peak my interest, i'm more into the arty side of things.

 

Exercise 4 3D layers

Today we were shown a new style of doing things. By quickly outlining a rough background and filling in the colours, we can create a quick and effective background or scene.

Its handy for rough drafts, tests and if you want a quirky kind of cartoon style.

I tried one out before the tutor gave us a file of his own to try out. I quickly made a colour pallet and layered it up. Its a pretty good way of figuring out how your idea is working out, very easy to alter and switch around ideas.

I then had a play around with the lineart that was given to me. Playing around with the colours and highlights.

I then altered his scene to my own liking and put it into aftereffects. Converting the layers into 3D layers i was able to create a little 3D scene!




Here is what I ended up with. I really do enjoy the effect a lot and will have to have a play with this when i do my final piece. Operating the camera was tricky and the computer i was using was very slow, making it even more difficult. This effect only works to a certain degree though. Little movements about the scene are fine but move a little too much and it looks cheap and strange. Just because the images are still flat. That's why I haven't gotten lots of broad movement in mine, its very subtle.

Exercise 2, shapes and masks.

This week I learnt about making shapes, masks and movement. Also a little bit about 3D layers ad cameras, which got very confusing!

We were shown a video by one of the best aftereffects artists, who uses shapes and masks to earn money. He transforms something so simple as 3 moving bars into a  moving 3D structure.

While watching and listening to this lesson i began to get very exited and eegar to have a go myself. I'm really into motion graphics and this is the first taste of it I have had so far, so naturally I wanted to experiment.

I want to animate to music so i dove straight in and decided to create an animation that is timed to music! So i drew up some artwork I could have a go at animating and selected music! I used the transforming settings to alter the masks which i had put on the colour and highlights. And I also moved around the masks at one point, so that it would strike across the scary wolf face. The black lines are made up of 3 layers, which i made into 3D layers. You cant really tell though as I couldn't get the right effect with the camera. It just didn't look right.
Also tried a bit or animating the words too which was fun, I actually like the ending the most, just because its the most intense and effective.

Really enjoyed doing this! Very happy with it, I count this a my first 'Real' attempt at making something decent on after effects. So i'm happy with that!

Excersise 1

Well its my first time in after effects, a program I have been curious about for years.
This little video here took me hours! Reading through tutorials, making mistakes and discovering new things which would slow me down. This is going to take ALOT of getting used to.


Im happy with this to an extent. Being a perfectionist I cant help but hate the last part. Its so jerky and out of time. I used the graph editor on the timeline for the transforms, but I could'nt get it to work. So I left it as it was. I had learnt a lot from this exercise but I wanted to focus on my next task which was way more exiting!