Clouds and Sloths

While in class when we were making shapes and having them fly around the screen I noticed that my shape kind of looked like an egg. When I added the wiggle function to the egg all I could think of when looking at my screen was the egg falling through the air. I made the background blue and then decided that the best way to simulate it falling would be to have clouds flying by. I'm not much of an artist and before I discovered the pen tool I had no hope. I'm getting much better with bezier curves and using the handles but I didn't have the time to draw nice clouds. I just googled clouds and found some nice vector based .PNG cartoony clouds at a site called Photoshop Scrap. It has a good amount of free photoshop resources that could be used in After Effects or animation software. I'm sure that there are many other websites like this one, probably some that are better, but this is where I found the clouds that Francine asked me about in class.

I also just used After Effects to finish a little side project. A few of my friends and I are working on flash animations for fun and we wanted to make a teaser for a little series we are starting. We decided on imitating the popular Yonker's music video with a sloth person instead of Tyler The Creator.

In this video the cameraman is constantly adjusting the focus of a tilt shift lens. I wanted to do this effect, but I don't have a tilt shift lens nor did I have anything to film, our animation had been done in Flash CS5. So I used After Effects masks to move a blur around the screen creating pretty much the same effect.