Using After Effects in all the right places

This is not going to be a post that blows your mind, nor will it be a well-articulated post (continuing the pattern of all my others). My goal today is simply to highlight an excellent job one of my editors has done using After Effects. I guess I should give you all the proper context. I'm currently in charge of post-production on the upcoming ICTV show Working Title. With this position comes the responsibility of overseeing the work of three individual editors working on six episodes throughout the semester.

The show is a simple one. Its style strongly represents those of The Office and Parks and Recreation. In a minimally complex show such as this, one would expect there to be very little to do in post-production other than cutting together the footage and tweaking the audio a bit. At least that's what I thought, and to be totally honest, that's mostly what our post-production has consisted of. That, and color correction.

For those of you who understand the basics of color correction (that's the extent to my knowledge), you know it's not usually a particularly complex process; some color adjustments here and there, mess around with the exposure and saturation a bit, nothing too complicated. That's just the foundation of the process, I know. It's enough to understand what I'm discussing, though.

Everyone say hello to Erin! Erin is a wonderful cast member of Working Title and also happens to be one of the editors of the show! While she's doing a great job on her two episodes, she is, unfortunately, not the editor I'm going to showcase this evening.

What do you think of this shot? Pretty good, right? Well lit, in focus, nicely framed. It's a great looking shot for not having any color correction done to it if I do say so myself. The image takes place at the Golden Bell Film Festival (the festival which Erin's film was submitted to). Oh, did I happen to mention this shot actually takes place during the showing of her film? Everything about this shot is wonderful, minus the fact that it certainly doesn't look like a film is showing. Now look at this:

Much better, right? I'm going to be totally honest, this was none of my doing (surprise!). I never thought to ask Eric, the editor behind this spectacular transformation, to make a change like this. He though of it all on his own, and did a phenomenal job. It's a bit difficult to see exactly what he did in this small image to the right, so I recommend clicking the image to see a larger version. I'm now going to try to remember everything Eric did to make the changes you can so clearly see.

To begin, Eric placed two masks over the shot. One around the outside of Erin and the seats in the first row, and another one directly over Erin and the seats (everything else). He darkened both these masks drastically and then added a slight blue tint to both of them to give them that dark, movie theater feel. He then feathered the edges of both the masks to have more of a fade in the exposure change rather than leaving a clear cut between the two masks. After that, Eric added a solid black layer over the entire shot and then simply dropped the opacity to approximately twenty percent to make the shot just the slightest bit darker.

Here's the best part of the whole thing. What you probably didn't notice (which is, in a way, an indicator that he did a great job with it) is that Eric also added two lights to the shot as well: one over to the left and one to the right. The one to the left acts as a light source that one would expect to see from a movie screen. The one to the right behaves as the light that would come from the projector in the back of the auditorium if it were turned on. The lights don't make any major changes to the overall shot, but they serve to give a much more natural feel to the scene. It just goes to show that After Effects doesn't have to be used for animation, but can be used merely to change to look of a project.

I would have never thought to do what Eric did to this shot (or at least I wouldn't have put forth the effort to do it). It's well-rounded editor's like him that we need more of in this field. Interesting fact: Eric is only a freshman. Booyah! Kid's got a bright future ahead of him.

Side note: If at all possible, come to the Working Title premiere this Friday in the Roy H. Park School of Communications auditorium at Ithaca College! Doors open at 4:30pm. Here's the Facebook event. I'm sorry, my producer made me do that...

Blue Valentine is a film directed by Derek Cianfrance, released in 2010. I watched it the other night and thought the end credits were superb.


Take a look:

This title sequence was designed by Jim Helton, an experimental filmmaker and editor who commonly collaborates with Derek Cianfrance. Mr. Helton has a very interesting past: born in Germany on a US army base, he then went off to attend the University of Colorado to study film under Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon, whose work he credits as his main influence.

 In an interview on theArtofTheTitle, he cites Phil Solomon as his main inspiration and recommends interested in this type of design to explore Phil's work. He talks about learning a process called "bi-packing," a process of placing two film strips on top of each other, and then rephotographing them to create a different effect than a superimposition. He goes on to describe his process for this sequence, made entirely on Final Cut Pro, taking a layer of footage of out-of-focus exploding fireworks, then taking the song by Grizzly Bear and using its rhythms to edit, and finally taking set photography by Davi Russo and reframing them to fit within the fireworks, and cutting them up into little details. Although he does not give away entirely his process, he says it was basically made with the composite feature and lots of tweaking. The fourth layer, the actual typeface for which he used  "a short fade in, and a long fade out, like exploding and disheartening light." And finally, the fifth layer he discusses is the sound recordings of fireworks streaking and crackling, children playing and laughing, mixing it with the image to create an abstract echo.

You can read the article here if interested:
http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/blue-valentine/

I really like the elegance of this piece, but I really love how this clearly shows me that the tools and tricks to do these things are not necessarily difficult at all. Instead, coming up with good design in the first place is the actual labor.

Phil Solomon's influence on Jim Helton makes it clear how important an awareness and attention to other design truly is for making original design work. By paying attention to other's work, Jim was able to find ideas as references points for this piece. For me, this is a good example of how paying careful attention to design, and being knowledgeable and active supplies you with a well of creative influence from which to pull.


You can see Phil Solomon's work here:
http://www.philsolomon.com/

Keyboard Shortcuts

I love to use keyboard shortcuts because it makes the workflow so much faster. Unfortunately as far as I know AE does not have a built-in hotkey editor like Maya or other programs have.

But AE has a lot, a LOT of keyboard shortcuts for almost everything, except very useful things like RAM Preview to hear the audio! c'mon Adobe!. If you have a numeric keyboard you can simply press . (period) to preview the sound, but Mac laptops don't have a numeric keyboard.

However there is a free script that you can download (and run inside AE) that allows you to explore and even re-map all hotkeys (not that I suggest you do that!.

I added that link under Design Tools and Other Links on the right column of the blog because I think everyone should download and install that script. Simply unzip and move the folder inside the After Effects Scripts folder. To access the scripts (and any other script) go to File>Scripts and launch it form there. This particular one I am talking about is called KeyEd Up.

If anyone figures out how to create or re-map a hotkey to do a RAM Preview let me know! enjoy:-)