As I said at the beginning of my task, due to some unfortunate technical difficulties I had to use a fellow students Lynda.com account.
Even though Laura Thomas’ name is on the certificate, my name is on nearly all of my work and there are print screens to show my process of working through each chapter of the tutorial.
Unfortunately due to using a different
version of After effects (CS5) I did not have many of the features covered. One
I did look into was tracking however the tracker was different in CS5.
For the Tracker I used the corner of the
eyes as tracking points as they are quite high contrast and are good points to
use. Once I had a good track, I applied the key frames to a null object. This
then allowed me to track things to the woman’s face. As an example I created a
moustache using a solid, and added a picture of a hat I had found online. I
parented these layers to the null and they moved with the woman’s head.
One of the great features of the Adobe
package is its simple integration between programs, such as photo shop and
premiere.
Here I used one of the photo shop files in Photoshop,
and then imported that into after effects as a composition. Within After Effects
all the adjustment layers and effects created in Photoshop had been retained in
After effects.
Next I created a Premiere file, imported a
few clips and then proceeded to link them to after effects using the ‘Replace
with After Effects Composition’ option. Now when I make changes to the footage
in after effects, such as adding effects, or in the example I’ve provided,
added text, it automatically updates the file in premiere to have these effects
applied. This is a very useful tool.
Using one of the video clips from the
website of the woman on the Greenscreen, began to look into keying. To make the
key easier, and not having to key any unnecessary information I created a mask
around the woman, this is known as a garbage matte.I then applied the key light plug in to this
layer and selected the green as the color to be removed. While this looked
good, It wasn’t completely right, so in order to tell what details the of the
key was being removed I the effect view to screen matte.
This revealed that some of her face and
jacket had been turned transparent from the key. In order to fix this, I
adjusted some of the screen matte options. Specifically ‘Clip black’ &
‘clip white’ This gave a much nicer key.
To stop the edjes being to harsh and to get
rid of any minor imperfections I adjusted the screen softness. To show how the
key looked, I placed another clip behind the keyed layer.
For this section I specified looking at
retiming footage.
I used 2 different methods. The first was
Time stretch where I adjusted it to be sped up. This effect affects the whole
clip. However the second method allows you to speed up or slow down specified
sections of video. For example a lot of action films will speed up a punch then
just after a hit they slow down the clip to make it seem more dynamic.
This method is known as time remapping. You
create key frames at the points you want to either speed up or slow down, then
drag the key frames either back or forth to affect the speed. In my example I
have the wind turbine moving at normal speed, then changing to be sped up, then
reverting back to normal speed at the end.
For this section I was looking at animating
type in mor advanced ways.
For this I key framed the source text of
the text layer. I changed the colour. When adding key frames to the source text
it creates a hold plug-in, so there is not a gradual change but it will only
change on the frame of the key frame.
I then proceeded to animate more options
such as position, fill colour etc. to test out various effects.
Unfortunately due to After effects being
CS5 and not CS6 like in the tutorials I was not able to follow the 3D text and
ray tracing tutorials as I didn’t have the features available.
I then Animated Text on a path. To do this
I created a text layer of my name, and created a circle mask on that layer. In
order to change it from a mask to a shape, I changed to the mask type to None.
Then on the Text layer I changed the path
options to follow this mask shape. This made the text morph around into a
circle. I then animated the first margin using key frames to move, and for a bit
of fun added a video layer of a woman’s face in the center and masked it into a
circle.
The finished graphic looks similar to
something in a children’s show.
