After Effects Monday 25th February

Today we looked at some more title sequences and examined how they were made.

The first one we recreated was from the film “The Raspberry Reich”

http://www.submarinechannel.com/titlesequences/video.jsp?video=22187

We recreated this by making a composition with 2 frames. One with the name Ahmed in red writing and the other being a solid red screen. We precomposed this then tiem remapped it and stretched it out over 20 secs. We then applies a wiggle to it to randomise the frames.

The next title sequence we looked at was from the film “hard candy”. We took one part of it and tried to recreate it.

We did this by creating a solid with a stroke that drew from the top to the bottom of the screen to create a line from top to bottom. We then duplicated the solid and masked either side of the line. Once we had done this, we could animate the solids to make it look like they were moving apart. We then duplicated the composition and rotated it 90 degrees. This created another spliting line behind the original one. We then changed the timings of each compostion to fit with each others movements. We then added a picture of lord of the rings behind it to make it look like the picture was being revealed.

We then animated some simple text to show the titles.

We then added some more solids to the top and the right hand side of the titles. We masked these using “image mattes” a well as standard masks. We animated them to appear from behind the lines we had created.

We then pre-composed this composition and added time remapping to it. We copied frame 00:00:01 from the beginning of the compostion and pasted it at the end to make the project disappear the same way it had appeared.

22nd Feb After Effects

Today we looked at the title sequence from “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”

We decided to try and duplicate the animation of growing plants that are in the title sequence. Firsly we had to design the vine, this was done in Adobe Illustrator. We placed each leaf and the stem on different layers and imported it as a cropped composition into after effects. The first thing we had to do was put the leaves in the right order on the timeline. We did this and then named each one. To make the stem seem like it was growing upwards, we used a stroke effect with the setting “reveal original image”. We copied the path from illustrator and pasted it to a new mask on the stem layer. We then set the stroke effect to draw along this mask. Next we had to make the leave look like they were growing. We did this by placing each leaves anchor point where it joined the stem. We then selected all of them and key-framed the scale. We then moved each set of leaves to start growing when the stem got to their anchor points.

We then precomposed this and placed many of them around the 3d space. We then added a light and a background to show the shadows of each vine growing.

Next we pre-composed the vines and places more of the groups of vines to grow around the space to give the impression of hundreds of vines growing at once. We animated a camera to move around the vines to add motion and interest to the animation.

After Effects 18th Feb

Today we looked at combining our previous lessons on animation with live video footage. To do this, we are using “placeholder” files. These are temporary files that allow us to animate without having the final footage. We created a cube like we did in the other lessons, but this time, instead of solids, we used placeholders. We animated the cube.

We then animated it a little more, switching to the other side of the cube that would contain the videos. For the final animation, we used a camera instead of rotating the cube itself.

We used the footage we created in our previous lessons to replace the placeholder files in the project. We had to resize some of them as they were slightly different from the placeholder file sizes.

Once we had added those files, we time remapped them to make them fit around the animation. Some of them we had to slow down to make them long enough for the animation, some of the we had to speed up. We did this by keyframing the time points that we wanted to show on the cube, and placed them in the correct places on the the timeline. We then duplicated the video cube and added a “Light Burst” effect from the “effects/generate” menu. We placed this behind the original cube, to give the impression of a backlit glow.

We then added a new solid to the background of the composition, and added a “ramp” effect from the “effects/generate” menu. This is basically a gradient fill tool that can be applied to any footage.

After Effects 15th February

Today we decided to make a 3D city scape. We would use the 3D techniques we learnt on monday aswell as some new ones.

Firstly we had to make the basis for the skyscraper. We would make this simply by using a black solid then scaling it to become a tall rectangle. We then made a new compostion which would be a window. This comprised of two solids, one being back and one being yellow. We placed the solids on top of each other, and made the composition only 2 frames long. 1 frame was the black solid, showing the window light as off, one being the yellow solid showing it as on.

We then placed this new compostition of the window in the black solid skyscraper to show a window. We placed 4 of these in a row and used time-remapping to swtich between the two frames of on-and-off windows to show the lights switching on and off. We then precomosed these 4 windows to creat a row of windows, we copied these down the skyscraper to form the whole building. This is the animation we created.

We then imported this composition into a new 3D environment, and copied it and scaled it many times to create a cityscape. We then animated a camera around it. Here is the animation.

We then went back to our original skyscraper composition and added the other walls and roof to make it a 3D skyscraper. We did this the same way we created the cubes on friday. We went back to the cityscape composition and animated the camera again.

We then keyframed the z-scale of the composition to create the effect of the buildings growing outwards from the 2D shape.

We then duplicated this composition and placed them further and further back to make it look like the city was growing. We keyframed their position to give this effect. We later added an ambient light and two spotlights. We animated the anchor point of the spotlights to show the lights moving.

Next we added some rain from the “effects/generate/rain” menu to an adjustment layer.

maya test animated

We made a bird using simple objects to show the timing for the animation.

11th February

Today we started looking at the 3D elements of After Effects. Firstly we animated some simple solids in a 3D space. We did this by enabling the 3D button on the layer and animating the keyframes of the Z-axis position parameter.

We then used 2D solids to create a cube. We did this by placing the anchor point of each solid at the top left corner or each shape. We then worked out the position of each side and moved then there using the 3D position parameter. Once they were places, we rotated them to fold around the shape of a cube.

We then created a null object and attched all the sides together to group the cube making it easy to animate the cube as one object.

After that, we pre-composed the cube into its own compostion, and created an animation of the cubes falling to produce a pyramid. To make the animation more fluid and organic we added “ease in” and “ease out” functions to the keyframes of the cubes falling.

We then looked at controlling camera around the 3D space in after effects. We created a camera and key framed the “point of interest” to look around the 3D cubes we had made previously. We also added key frames to the “zoom” function in the camera options dialogue.

We then animated the camera to move along a path created by placing keyframes on the camera’s postion. We experimented with the “wiggle” tool to create a random shake as the cubes land. We added this shake by attaching a Null object to the camera’s position and animating that. We then added another null, with a more severe wiggle effect causing the camera to shake as it moved along its path.

Next, added 2 spot lights to the scene. We had to postion them so that the shaddows were cast on the floor as well as light up the scene. We created a floor using a solid shape, and also changed the background colour to very dark blue.

We took the wiggle off the camera movement so it didn’t confuse the viewer

friday 8th February

After Effects.

Firstly, we recapped everything we had done so far for the use of this blog. Some of the work we had done in previous lessons was not available to upload but we reanimated some of the things we had done.

We quickly animated some solids using basic keyframes with the position parameter.

We also looked as very basic masking of solids. We created a mask which was animated to change shape by keyframing the “mask shape” parameter of the layer mask.

Next, we used a null object to animate a group of solids to rotate around a central point.

We then pre-composed the composition with the null object animation and copied it numerous times to demonstrate the ease in which multiple animations can be animated with after effects.

Text animation techniques with Lens Flare

We then animated some text by separating each letter and putting it in its own layer. We then animated the layers separately by keyframing the scale of each letter. This gave the impression of each letter falling into place. Once we had animated the letters, we used the “sequence layers” option to position them one after the other on the timeline. We also added a preset text blur effect to have each letter come into focus as it landed.

We then precomposed the animated text and added a “lens flare”. We animated this lens flare so that the center point moved along the text as each letter landed.

We used a “matte track” to get rid of the background around the lens flare. We’ll go into this with more detail another time. We then changed the background colour to a dark blue and added a solid black over the background. We then masked a hole in the black solid and applied a heavy feather to it so soften the edge. This gave the impression of a spotlight.

We then added a slight animation to the positioning of the the text to make it look at though it was moving slowley towards us.

Tree animation

We imported a black and white image of a tree that we had drawn in adobe illustrator. We used the “auto-trace” feature to create an automatic mask of the image. We applied a “stroke” effect on the image using the mask that we created. We set the stroke to “on transparent” to give the impression of an outline of a tree. We then keyframed the “start” and “end” parameter of the stroke effect to animate the outline to look like it was being drawn.

We then duplicated the tree layer with the mask and applied a “scribble” effect to it. We chose a brown colour and set the scribble angle and line thickness as we needed. As with the stroke effect, we keyframed the start and end to make it look like the tree was being coloured in.

We then pre-composed this and added many copies of it to a new animation to create a scribbled forest.

In the same way, we created a grass area, the sky, some clouds and a sun. We carefully placed all the items on the time-line to give the impression they were being drawn one after the other.

Once we had all the items in place, we animated the clouds moving to bring the picture to life.

maya test animation