Finished!!

After hours researching, hours in After Effects I have finally finished!!

Im pretty happy with this, and I feel i've worked really hard at it.

So, here it my finished product!

Lights, Camera, Action!!

Okay, so i've pretty much made this now, although I want my Logo on it!

I don't really have many fonts, so I went to dafont and grabbed me some funky looking font that I like, with the font I am going to have this at the beginning of the sequence and at the end.

I found one eventually, and I am pretty happy with this and have used it not just on my logo, but on just about everything.

Regarding the logo I haven't really done a lot I wrote the text on the background and then made it 3D but because I wanted two logos I had to make two different compoisitions and then include them in my sequence, I didn't add much effect to them I changed the opacity of one at the beginning to get a fade in kinda of effect, and then at the end I faded in the other one and made it grow in size gradually.

Whilst doing this I haven't mentioned about keeping a grunge feel to it, now i kinda forgot at first, but found out pretty quickly that it already had a grunge feel too it.

Im pretty much there now, I want to add some audio onto the background, not a clue what I am doing yet, although I think I'm going to have Nivarnas' Heart shaped box playing in the back off it, because it suits the video quite well.

I feel like I should speak about what I have done to the photos to make them work. Well I actually haven't done much with them, i created them using separate compositions and just included them into the main composition. Then what I did with them was made them a 3D layer since I am using a camera. When i entered them into the composition i deliberately didn't have them on screen this is so I can make it look like someone has just thrown the photo into the compositon.

Lighting is a nice thing on After Effects I hadn't really used lights before but I thought well im just gonna add one and move it around a tad and hey ho I got the gist of it pretty quickly and managed to create a smooth round edge look on my background which looked good. I played this through to see if the light would continue all the through the sequence, it didn't. Which got me thinking well, if like cameras lights are hard to move I will need to link it to my Null Object, which i did, and it worked!! So i was feeling pretty chuffed with myself.

Light on!

Light off!

I have had a pretty productive couple of hours and feel I have learnt a lot, I have finished the sequence now, although I just need to pop it into premier to render it, After Effects makes my files too big, which I'm not a fan off.

After Effects

So I've been busy designing my idea, and planning out what I want it to all look like although I am have an issue, how do I make the second camera pan? This is something I need to look into.

I searched youtube, and too be honest it didn't take very long at all to find a tutorial that would help me achieve this. It was pretty simple, I only listened to a few minutes of the tutorial then I knew what to do.

I should probably prove myself.

Okay to create a camera what you need to do is;

1. Create a new composition
2. Add a Camera object - Camera's can only be used on 3d layers therefor you will need to make all your layers 3D, to do this there is a 3D option within the layers, its the Cube just tick that box and your layer will become 3D.
3. Create a Null Object, the purpose of this is to control the camera otherwise according to the tutorial I watched it is hard to control camera's without a Null Object.
4. Now you need to make the Null Object and the Camera work together to do this you can see a spiral sort of thing near the 3D layer option, if you click the spiral from the camera to the Null Object they will become linked and work with each other.
5. What you need to do now is decide what way you want the camera to pan. For this I decided I would grab a random image, enlarge it so that it was off my screen and then guide the Null Object around it.
6. With this you need to create positions for the camera to do the press 'P' this will load the position of the layer and allow you to key them in.
7. Set the keyframe to your starting position, then move your timer to however much you wish on your timeline and keep setting them in the way you want until you are satisfied with the movement you have.

Example:

The quality isn't brilliant, but it shows the camera panning around the image.

What happens is that the camera actually stays still and the image moves around the camera which is pretty cool!

I applied this to my sequences allowing me to pan through the image, and throwing photos into the mix.


Anyway this is as far as I've got so far I've done a few more bits on the video and its pretty much finished. However I'm not 100% happy with it yet so will keep this up to date on whats happening!

Getting there!!

After coming up with an idea of a photo book sort of sequence for After Effects, I figured I need to do some research on how to create one!

Then I saw that a photo throw effect looked a lot better and is really simple to create!

So i got thinking, what looks good? I first was going to have white border around the picture, sort of like a Polaroid photo.

Example:

This is the design I have chosen for my photographs.

However once put into the movie, I didn't like it so I got rid of the white solid behind the photo, and just had the text showing on the background along with image. After I had resolved this issue I needed to start thinking about the background. What will it look like? How would it suit? Anyway i thought a washed out sort of tea stained look would suitable for the background image and it worked out pretty well, although I then figured I would need the background to loop continuously which required me to make a loop of the background using after effects.

Looping wasn't too difficult, I got my original placed it within After effects, moved it off the composition and put a new one in, I did this until I reached 40 seconds, the reason for the 40 seconds is because my whole sequence is 33 seconds, meaning If I wanted to make it longer then I could. After this I saved it, put it within premier and rendered it through premier.

Example:

It's very blurred, but this is my background.

Anyway its all working out quite well and coming together quite nicely at the moment, I have thought about the motion and how I could make it work, looking at other videos on Youtube of photo-throwing I'm pretty sure I can do it.

Starting Off

After too much procrastination over the christmas period, today was the day i decided to bite the bullet and attempt this assignment.

I grabbed my energy drink and a sneaky subway and put my mind to work.

At first I was a bit unsure on how I would do this however after much thinking I sort of realised I'm gonna need a sort of photo book to make this work.

From the word go I was pretty much decided on what song I was going to use to cover my motion piece this being 'Heart Shaped Box' by Nivarna. It suits the piece I am doing and well since Nivarna was a big part of the Grunge Era it made a whole lot of sense to do it.

So anyway I headed to Video-copilot to see if I could find any tutorials on this subject, after well not very much looking I soon realised this wasn't going to happen since they didn't have anything on this subject...Boo.

So I got thinking, how would I make this? I headed to Youtube to check on tutorials. However Youtube being Youtube, didn't get what I meant by the looks of it so I just checked some videos out and left it at that.

So i wasn't having a hell of a lot of luck, although there are some pretty eye catching things out there! 

I took to the drawing board, thinking how do i do this? How will I make my video, Television standard?

I then thought, lets open After Effects!

Once After Effects was open I thought a bout using a template to help me create my sequence, I proceeded to look for one, eventually finding one, my initial thought was great! lets just use this so I don't have to do the work. However although that would be the easy way out, and even though it was an open source template, I thought no and just used the template as an idea.

Anyway up to now the project is going quite well, not that I have actually achieved anything yet, although I am getting their and really getting a feel for the project!