So while I've been becoming more comfortable with After Effects, one aspect that just doesn't seem to come easy to me is the adding of expressions and their outcomes. Maybe because I have no experience with coding or I'm just not familiar with them yet setting a "wiggle" expression is about all I can do. So after watching some youtube videos and searching out links, the adobe site helped me the most. I will definitely be bookmarking that site for later use.
Adobe has many other pages that will not doubt help as our projects become more and more complex, including pages about techniques and new features, just to name a few.
One video I enjoyed watching is about the wiggle expression and a lot of fine details about what it can do.
In an attempt to better familiarize myself with the ins-and-outs of After Effects, I've been doing my best to sit down a few times a week to play around with the program and practice different tutorials, outside of our class assignments. Last week, I was looking through some of the beginner-type tutorials offered on Video Copilot when I cam across this:
Obviously, the effect is not something terribly complex. However, at home I work as content creator for the Buffalo Bisons (Triple A Affiliate of the Blue Jays), so this caught my attention as something to apply to my own work. And because I always have endless amounts of baseball footage to play with on my drive, I thought I'd give it a go. Here is what I ended up with:
The idea of the effect is to create the perception of power. Most of my shooting I use simply a monopod in order to be most mobile when following play action. If, though, I used a tripod and got steadier footage the effect would probably do an even greater job of highlighting that impact. I definitely think this is a cool trick to potentially enhance my work.
This past week my favorite record label, Spinnin' Records, released a preview to a new song by Alex Kenji and Leon Boiler.
What I find really fun to do now that I know more about After Effects is to watch videos and try to analyze what they did. It looks like they put a wiggle expression on the camera to make it shake throughout. There are also a couple of color flares thrown in here and there that are pretty easy to make in After Effects.
Something I would love to learn how to create are all the "straws" that form the portal around the :48 mark and seen throughout. They seem to be effected by the sound of the music so their animation must be parented to the audio. Also at 1:02 and 1:08 the rotating portals are really fun to watch but I guess they were made in Processing and not in AE. I make that guess based on their similarities to the fractal pattern at the end of the Casino Royale opening. But alas! I will see what I can figure out in AE.
