On Monday 2nd November we started learning all about the after effect programme. We are all really lucky as we are being taught all the ins and outs of after effects by James, in this first lesson we learnt how opening credits which look really fancy, complicated and something an A level student couldn't do, actually is pretty simple, very effective, and touch wood as an a-level student I shall be able to do!
Me, Caitlin and Georgie had used after effects for one of our clips in the hangover when we were trying to blur the background, we actually used the pen tool to draw round the main character (which was the tool we also used on Monday), so it wasn't as daunting at it might of been luckily!
We focused on the graphic titling and shapes of 'Anatomy of a Murder' (directed by Otto Preminger in 1959) in the lesson. We firstly got to grips with the initial set up of the programme, and the basic skill of adding text. We then all had the tricky choice of choosing the colour scheme for our sequence, I think mine has to be the least relevant colour scheme to the titling 'murder' as it was a very girlie pink. We had the aim in the first hour to create a still image of two shapes and the titling; we learnt how to put shape layers in, and how to draw and manipulate the actual shape; another thing I have learnt from this art is definitely not my career path!
We then after lunch started by doing the "housekeeping" we renamed our layers, deleted extra layers that some had accidentally added (surprisingly I hadn't added any extra!). Then it was time to get animating; this is where I had a bit of disaster; my first attempt went really well I created a small sequence where my shapes and words moved in; and then the computer froze (the reaction from me was shouting "James heeeeeelp); unfortunately I had not saved my work since we had started animating so i had to recreate my sequence (well at least I got more practise - one bonus from this) and this time I actually think my sequence flowed better, but decide for yourself see below my first attempt on after effects!
James has been coming back every week to spend two hours with us developing our skills and confidence by exploring all the elements of after effects, and showing us what a group of A level students with no budget could still produce! On Friday 11th November we came in a saw on the screen the tellytubbies opening (yes all our childhood TV watching memories came back to us!), but after a few minutes of excitement we worked out we would actually have to reproduce this opening (uh oh I was thinking!) James went through step by step with us though to make it less daunting - we first of all had to go back to what we have learnt the previous lesson and added in new layers and imported the files that we would need to create the opening (slightly scary laughing baby in all!). After setting up the layers, we started drawing the shape of the sunshine behind the baby's face (using our skills that we had learnt from the previous lesson), we then extended our knowledge by looking at how you can distort the line (I made mine go wiggly, but the lines were still quite harsh so I added a blur to them which for me I found an effective editing tool and I would be interested using it for my final piece). Now we had the basic still frames we had to animate them to create a sequence. We had learnt the basics of animating the session before on after effects, so this was going over what we had learnt and building on our confidence of animating in after effects. This is my final production, it has the added text which I added after learning about it in the next session with James (I have explained about this session below), I may not be employed by the production team to create the next tellytubbies opening but I think for my second after effects lesson I have done a pretty good job!
On Monday 16th November we explored titling in more detail (and making it look much more interesting then our first session showed in our first piece). We first of all went over the basic of inserting text, then changing the font, size and colour. We also has a brief discussion of what a different font can show and what would be a bad choice of font (example = comic San is related to primary school's so would not be a good text to use in a thriller film). We then explored adding an effect to the fonts through animation clips (example = a blur, increasing and decreasing the size). we then looked at how to make a words follow a certain path, the clip below "don't get boxed in" shows my work which I did for this part. The reason why we have been doing all this work in after effects is to help us when creating our own logos, and titling sequences, therefore we started exploring after effects a bit for ourselves this lesson and started thinking about what our production names could be, and what images could be used for our production company.
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