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.
