After Effects 13th March

Today, we decided to create some titles for the film Titanic. We decided to create an animated sequence. The first thing we needed to do was create the things we wanted to animate. We made the Titanic by tracing around a photo of the ship using shape layers. We made some sea by creating a solid and adding a “wave warp” effect to it. We tweaked the settings so it looked like it was moving to the right. We added ramp effects to both the sky and the sea to give it more depth. We then animated the ship moving along the surface of the water.

The next seen we wanted to create was the ship hitting the iceberg. We created an iceberg using the shape tool. We wanted it to seem like it was night, so we added an adjustment layer over the sea. We then changed the ramp on the background to a darker blue. We set up a mask to slide between the day and night, and had the ship dissapear behind this mask.

Once the mask had completed its slide, we animated the ship to come back in from the other side of the screen. We reversed the ship composition so it was moving the other way. We simple animated the ship crashing into the iceberg.

Next we wanted to make some smoke that would come out of the ships funnels. We did this using a particle simulator called “particle playground”. We used a Cannon emitter to disperse the particles and set them to white. We also changed the gravity for to pull the particles to the left as it was moving with the ship. We then added a blur and colorama effect to the particles to make it look more like smoke.

We then added some simple titles to the animation. The first, were animated to swim in the water across the screen. We did this with some simple keyframing. The next was on the ship itself, which was done by simply parenting it to the ships composition.

The cinematography title was also attached to the ship, but when it hit the iceberg it slides off. We did this by animating its position and adding an echo effect to the text to give the effect of it sliding off the boat.

After Effects 9th March 2008 pt 2

Today we looked at the “per character 3D” feature of After Effects CS3. We wanted to create a page of numbers falling down through a 3D space. CS3 has a new function that enables the use of animating each text character in 3D.

Firstly, we created a page of numbers from 0-9 using the standard cut and paste tool. We then added an animator function to the text to make the numbers change randomly. We did this by adding a “character offset” animator to the layer. We set it to “ramp up” and switched the random order button on. Once we had done this, we switched on the “percharacter 3D” button. This enables the z-position parameter. We keyframed this from -1500 to 0 over a few seconds. This had the effect of the numbers falling from 3D down to 2D.

We then took a picture of Ahmed and took out the background in after effects. We took this image and turned it into a Luma matte for the “numbers” layer This gave the impression of the numbers falling into the shape of Ahmed’s head. We then created a new solid and applied a Ramp effect to it. This added some colour to the animation. Here is the result.

After Effects 9th March 2008

Today we looked at 2 techniques. The first was for creating animated backgrounds using “fractals”. The purpose was to create a simple, yet interesting animated background that could be used for title sequences, credits, web design, of just as an interesting texture in an animation.

Here is the first fractal we created, we played around with the setting until we got one we liked. We also animated the evolution, to create movement within the fractal.

We then created another fractal with different settings, we wanted something with lines, this is what we came up with. We used the vertical scale option to create this effect.

We then overlaid the two fractals and applied a color burn to the top one. This gave us this effect.

We then created a new solid and applied a ramp effect to it. This gave it a gradient fill. We then Precomposed the 2 fractals, and placed our solid above it. We then applied a multiply effect to the transfer option and it gave us this effect.

We weren’t completely happy with the animation, so we precomped what we had and duplaicated it. We then applied a luma key to the top composition to get rid of the black and rotated it 90 degrees. This gave another layer of the fractal we had just created. Here is the final result.

Thursday 6th March 2008

Today we wanted to create a new view out of a window by replacing the original view with one that we had created. So, the first thing to do was to shoot a small piece of footage to use in the tutorial. We shot this in the training room. The view outside the window was quite bright so it would be easy to matte. This is the footage we shot.

The first thing we had to do was to create a mask for the footage. It wasn’t just a still image, so we had to make sure that we were masked out well when we walked across the window. First of all, we created an alpha matte using after effects. This was just a black box drawn around the shape of the window. We could have done this using a mask within after effects, but found it easier to do it this way. The idea was to create our own alpha channel that we could apply to the layer itself. When we had imported the alpha channel for the window, we only had to worry about the area of the footage where we walked across the window. We used a variety of effects to create a black and white silhouetted image of us walking across the window. We used levels, blurs, an thresholds to create this effects. Here is the extracted matte we pulled from the footage.

We placed this image over the original footage and set it as an Luma matte to make the window transparent.

The next thing to do was create the background to put into the footage. We decided to create a futuristic landscape with skyscrapers poking out of clouds. The first thing we did was find a suitable image of a skyscraper and cut around them using the mask tool. We ten separated the buildings onto separate layers so we had individual control of them. Next we got a picture of a sky and placed it behind the buildings. We then found a picture of some clouds and keyed out the blue from the sky so we could overlay them onto the building. Next we used the “tritone” effect on the sky, buildings and clouds to give everything an orange/golden colour. We thought this worked well with the futuristic elements of the image. We tried out various other effects such as brightness and contrasts on the whole composition to make it look darker and more stylistic.

Next we added some fractal noise and some CC Rain over the composition to simulate some simple weather effects. Here is the finished result.

We then simply added the background we’d created to the footage. We scaled it and positioned it so it looked realistic. We also added the same tritone effect to the original footage.

We realised that the matte we’d created wasnt quite right, so we added a matte choker to trim away the edge of the matte. For an extra, we decided to apply a small zoom and rotation to the composition using a simple camera and by making the layers 3D. Here is our final result.

After Effects 3rd March

Today we looked at the title sequence from “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium” We decided to recreate the paper plane animation that was at the beginning of the sequence. We did this by firstly creating a composition of a 3D paper plane. We did this by creating masked solid layers that were she shape of each fold of paper. We then lined them up to create a 3D replica of a paper plane. One We then attatched all the sides with a Null object so they could be easily animated.

We then took that composition and animated it in a 3D space to make it look like it was flying. We had to spend some time getting the keyframes right so we it looked natural. It still need a bit more work.

We then wanted to add the dotted line trail behing the plane. We did this using a stroke effect and drawing a mask that followed the planes journey.

To make it work as a title sequence, we then added some very simple text to the animation. We first pre-composed what we had done so far and enabled the time remapping. We there then able to simple add a freeze frame. We then key framed the position and scale parameters of the pre-composed animation to give the impression of a zoom in. We added some text to it, and parented these text layers to the plane composition. This made the text stcik to the plane and follow it when it was animated. We then key framed the text to fade in as it came closer.

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.

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