My something

What is my something? Well, whenever I have a whinge to the boyfriend about a dilemma or learning something new, he proceeds to say 'do SOMETHING'. He emphasises the something so I am jolted into action. It works every time. Anyway, here is my something.

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After Effects Day 5

So the watermelon project continues.

The cutout feature I was looking for in my last post, is called masking! Which just quietly, is the coolest effect ever. Making layers and text appear and disappear is I’m sure only the tip of the iceberg.

I finished watching Mac Square’s video on Type on Text Effect to add the definition. I decided not to include the blinker, next time perhaps. 

I should probably give you the background on the vegan business. My brother’s lovely girlfriend Steph has a Youtube channel called justanothervegan. I’m such a huge fan, she talks openly about her lifestyle, the foods she eats and is generally not afraid to share her opinion with the world. For that I really respect her and what she stands for. She has got quite a following on Youtube, and posts videos daily. However, she doesn’t have an intro!

So I decided to create her one. I haven’t told her yet, in case it goes horribly wrong or she feels obliged to use it, it needs to be perfection. 

So as you can see, I’ve added some text, and also added the first 2-3 seconds of one of her videos just to see how it could look. I think it’s a bit long.

Also, it’s bothering me that my watermelon isn’t perfectly 90 degrees, now that I’ve precomposed the semi circles I have no idea how to edit the individual layers. A question for Dan perhaps, aside from Google he’s my go to guy.

[rachpage70]

After Effects Day 4

So this beauty, I wish I could say was planned, but turns out it’s an accident. A good accident of course. 

I started off wanting to learn how transitions work. I watched How to create a slide transition in After Effects and successfully created some funky solid layers which rotate in. Check them out here

It was time for something a bit more challenging, which is when I came across How to create a radial transition in after effects.

This tutorial described a transition with circles. Unfortunately my velocity was all off and I accidentally created a series of circles unfolding in a clockwise motion. I quickly moved away from the tutorial, applied some colour and black spots and we have a watermelon!

I dabbled with the positions of the watermelon seeds to drag them all into the centre, OH and time remapping. I couldn’t time remap an individual layer so I found some instructions to precompose the pink and green circles. Still unsure what I’ve done technically speaking, but it enabled the time remapping feature so I could slow the video at the 0:02 second mark. 

I'm quite proud of this actually, I'd like to add some bite marks to it, perhaps there is a cutout feature in After Effects. I was thinking it would be a great intro to a YouTube channel about food.

[rachpage70]

After Effects Day 3

Tonight I attempted the Introduction to After Effects tutorial by Mac Square. Honestly, I got 10 minutes in and hit a roadblock. I mean, look at the thumbnail, my ‘sparks’ aren’t exactly aligned. 

I successfully created multiple shape layers, edited the number of dashes, stroke width and experimented with repeaters. As soon as it came to aligning the sparks around the green circle they went a bit awol. 

Struggling to get past it, I troubleshooted for what felt like an hour, watched and rewatched the tutorial and decided to have a break. It’s been 3 days... 

I’m determined to fix it and move on. Stay tuned.    

[rachpage70]

After Effects Day 2

Day 2 of After Effects, I turned to Youtube for a different sort of tutorial. 

I came across Ross Plaskow’s How to Make a Cartoon which looked rather entertaining. Ross has such a quirky personality, I really enjoyed completing the tutorial.

I ended up with a cute dinosaur that rocks back and forth on his feet. I couldn’t bring myself to record any audio, like Ross’ “Oh hey, I’m Ross, I’ve run out of things to do so I’m going to making a f*&^ing tutorial”. So I added some text and moved his little mouth. 

I learnt lots more about key frames by changing the rotation percentages along the timeline. I also picked up a few cheeky shortcuts (cmd F9 to easy ease). I learnt how to create a cartoon in Illustrator by adding different layers for different body parts. It was then imported into AE, the body became the parents for the arms, legs, eyes and mouth which meant the whole body and its limbs could rotate and move as a whole. By moving the anchor point the object could rotate on that axis. Oh, another fun shortcut (Y to edit the anchor point)

Don’t get my started on the mouths, “create 8 mouths” he said. I made 4 because I’m impatient. Blew my mind how he changed the composition length with each mouth on it’s own frame. This enables us to select which mouth to use by simply typing in the frame number. Cool right? 

[rachpage70]

Day 1 of After Effects. I downloaded a trial version, that’s a pretty good start.

At the advice of a friend, I also got onto Video Copilot, a great resource containing step by step tutorials for title design, particle animations, shattering, animating stills etc.

I picked a tutorial at random by searching for the word animation. The first project I created was an Animated Polygon

I dabbled in creating layers, using radio waves, time displacement and shadows. I set my first key frames and relied heavily on the undo button. What should have been a 22 minute tutorial ended up being 4 hours long as I played the tutorial again and again . It was a success, I’m quietly happy with the finished product.

I still don’t know what a composition is but I can confidently add freeze frames and new compositions despite not knowing what that exactly means.

[rachpage70]

Hey there

Hey there,

My challenge is Adobe After Effects.

Why After Effects? A couple of weeks ago I needed to create a 1 minute explainer video for work in under 1 week with no budget. With no animation experience or resources I stumbled across Powtoon which did the job, a great little drag and drop software tool which is free! However it left me frustrated as I couldn’t control every animation or transition and the graphics available were limited unless you purchased the premium version.

Sooo.. I thought, stuff it, let’s learn After Effects and blog about the learning process.