Our final assignment for first year was to create six animated shorts, twenty five seconds in length each, for a local film festival to use as idents before their showreels. To accomplish this, we were split into several groups (stop motion, cutout, smudge and click, 3D and compositing) to tackle storyboarding, making assets, animating said assets and then editing all of the footage and mediums together into a final product.
I was placed in the compositing team. This meant that for a large portion of the project, I didn't have any work to do, so in order to combat that I was put on standby for the 3D team as well as helped the cutout group with making a few of their assets, more specifically the sun, the moon and parts of a walrus yawning. I did not animate these but helped with cutting them out and colouring them.
Once the footage was handed over to the compositing team, I was able to get started. I'd been assigned to the Sisyphus animation, in which several statue men pushed boulders up a hill and then sat at the top, turned on a projector and the film festival logo would come into view.
The ident in question is composed of three shots, so I decided to work on the middle one first as I felt that this would be the easiest to tackle first. The shot would be from behind the statues as they walked up the hill, using a rotating 3D ball to give the impression of motion. The Penshaw Monument would gradually come into view.
I started by laying out where I wanted the backdrop to be and how much sky was to be visible. For this, I used a stock image of a blue sky as a placeholder and then imported the rotating 3D ball.
This was moving as intended, so I then started to add in some of the figures. The original footage for these was shot against a green screen, so I started to isolate them by masking around them loosely and then used a keylight filter to remove the green background. I quickly encountered a problem with this, however. As the figures were painted metallic silver, they were reflecting some of the green and therefore parts of them were being lost in the keylight. To fix this, I set the keylight so that all of the model would be visible and then subtract masked over parts of the green screen that also became visible to hide them. I repeated this for every frame of the walk cycle and then duplicated it to have all three figures cleanly walking up the hill.
I also had some difficulties with one of the models in particular. Whilst in the other footage the models all walked in place, one of them moved forward, which didn't fit the moving hill. To fix this, I keyframed in scale and position transformations to keep every frame of the model as close to the same position as I could get. This made it look like the character was walking in place.
I then added the Penshaw Monument in. To do this, I took a photo of the model made by the stop motion team and removed the background using masks. I then placed it behind the rotating hill layer and keyframed a position transformation with a slow-in to the final keyframe so that it would gradually come into view.
For now, I opted to keep the stock image of the sky in the composition as I wanted to complete all three shots before adding it so that the time of day would be consistent across each of them.
There were some issues with this shot. A lot of back-and-forth was spent on the models, as the animators wanted there to be five characters going up the hill, two of which worked as a duo. This was added in, however I was unable to see the footage for the fifth character in the first shot on OneDrive. This may have been entirely my own error and I likely missed it despite checking, however because of this I cut the fifth character out of the other shots.
The ending shot was what I tackled next. I knew from the reference animatic that this shot would definitely take place at night, so I was confident using the cutout footage for the night sky for this straight away. I also took a photo of the Penshaw Monument model on top of the hill model that the stop motion team had made, then keylit out the blue screen background and masked out any stray pieces that weren't meant to be there.
I then started to add in the statue characters from footage, using the aforementioned method of keylight and masking to clean the footage up. These characters were then positioned on top of the hill.
The sky background animation was moving very fast, so I also added a time stretch effect of 800 to it to extend it and slow it down, which had the desired effect. This was where I left the final shot for now.
The last shot I tackled was the opening one. I knew that this would start with the sun up, so I imported that background and the sunset straight away. I also added a time stretch of 200 to slow the descent of the sun slightly.
The ground, however, was where I ran into my first issue. I was unable to find any flooring for this section within the shared OneDrive folder as presumably one had not been made. To fix this, I used the photo I'd reviously taken of the hill and monument for the final shot, turned it onto its side and then zoomed in to give the look of a gentler slope. I then keylit and masked around the edges to remove the background. This solution was far lower quality than I would have liked, especially up close, however given that there was no alternative flooring I couldn't see another way forward.
I then added in the statue men walking up the hill and used the same keylighting and masking method as before to remove the background from each bit of footage.
Now that I'd finished a basic first pass for all three shots, I started to go back through and refine them with things like colour grading and redoing the keylight in places to make it cleaner (patches of the figures were missing in some sections, which needed fixing. I also wanted to fix some of the model colours, as I'd colour range adjusted them to clumsily remove the green reflections, however had since learned of a simpler way to do this).
The first one I sorted out the colour grading for was the ending shot. The scene was set at night but the separate assets were filmed with during the day, so to fix this I would need to darken them, lower the saturation and make everything more blue toned. I first worked this out on the hill, on which I used a combination of curves, colour balance and colorize - moonshadows to achieve a darker, nighttime look.
I then repeated a similar process on the sky and the characters so that they fit in with the rest of the environment. A glow effect was added onto the moon in the background as well to give the impression of light.
Additionally, upon checking the reference animatic I realised that boulders and a projector were supposed to be present in this shot. The projector photos were quickly provided by part of the stop motion team, which I was able to cut out and then colour grade to fit. For the boulders, however, I was unable to find any photos of them on OneDrive so I instead took screenshots of footage for the first shot and cut them out in Photoshop, then saved them as transparent images and imported them into After Effects. This allowed me to place and colour grade them in with the rest of the scene.
At one point, there was a fifth figure sat on top of the boulders added in after they were, however this was later removed due to the previously mentioned continuity issue.
Some of the final visual tuning for this scene included adding shadows and a light beam to the projector. As there was no footage that could be used to make accurate shadows for the figures and time constraints prevented me from making some, I instead used the drop shadow effect to add some in, which were not as accurate as I'd hoped but still helped to add some depth and detail to the scene.
For the light beam, I used the pen tool to create a light yellow cone shape starting at the projector. Using keyframing, I was able to make the opacity flicker as it turned on. Following feedback, I also decreased the opacity of the beam closer to the projector using a subrtract mask with the feather transformation, which allowed for a transparency gradient.
Lastly, at the end of the beam was supposed to be the logo, which the camera would pan over to. To do this, I pre-composed all of the footage into one folder, the shape for the light beam and a flat yellow background into another and then added in two versions of the logo on top. On one version of the logo, I used keylight to remove the background and then used an invert filter to make the text on it black. The other I left alone.
I used keyframing and position transformations to have the animated section move off screen to the right while the logo would glide into frame, giving the effect of a camera panning over. Following feedback, I added in slow-ins and outs to the movement to make it look less robotic.
The final thing I did for this shot was to add in a fade between the black text logo and the official logo using keyframed opacity transformations.
The next shot I adjusted was the middle one. This took far less time as there was a lot less to add.
Having already done the nighttime colour grading for the final shot, I had more confidence in what I was doing and was able to complete this a lot faster using a similar combination of curves adjustments, colour balance editing and brightness/contrast effects.
One issue I ran into was with the drop shadows on the models, as I wasn't sure how to make the effect clip to the hill and it would occasionally spill out onto the sky. To fix this, I avoided using drop shadows entirely for this shot and duplicated the pre-comp of the figures moving. I then used several brightness/contrast layers to silhouette them, lowered their opacity and then moved them to sit underneath the figures like shadows. I was then able to use a set matte layer to clip the shadows to the hill. With some small adjustments to the sizing of the monument, this shot was complete.
The last shot I had left to tackle was the opening one. This was set during the day which would make colour grading easier, however also included a sunset, which would make things slightly more difficult.
I found that I was struggling to use the same colour grading method I'd used before as it didn't allow for transitioning between colours smoothly, at least not in a way that I was able to see. Instead, I opted to use the gradient ramp effect, which allowed the colour grading to shift from one colour to another. This quickly created the desired effect on the grass, so I copied it across to the sky and the colour grading for this scene was quickly complete.
Following feedback, I adjusted the boulder men masks in this shot so that they would appear to go behind the bushes. I used subtract masks to achieve this. I also added shadows - as the footage was taken from the side this time, I was able to duplicate the footage, flip it upside down, darken them into silhouettes and then reduce the opacity to create more realistic shadows than drop shadows would allow for. I also used subtract masks with the feathering transformation to cut out the spaces where the bushes were so that the shadows wouldn't go over them. This was the last thing needed to complete the shot.
The final thing that was needed was to add in sound. All of the required sound effects had been recorded by other members of the compositing team and were available on OneDrive, so all that was needed was to put them in order in After Effects.
For the first shot, I layered some leafy sounds for the grass and some birdsong that I keyframed using an audio levels transformation to fade out as the sun set. For the second shot, I added the same leaf sound effect although slightly quieter as well as a wind sound. For the final shot, the characters were still so no leaf sounds were needed and the wind was quieter. Cricket sounds were also added, as was the hum of a microwave to mimic the sound of the projector turning on and running. I cut the audio for this and made some minor volume edits in order to match the flickering.
With some final adjustments to the sound, the ident was finished.
This project was a good learning experience and I feel significantly more confident with After Effects afterwards. Were I to do this again, I'd likely try to work faster, which would be possible as I have more knowledge of the program now and how to find solutions to problems that I encounter.
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