Tackling Animation with Infographics

As I start to tackle my infographic project I realized how much animation is required. It may not necessarily be the most complex animation but I looked into some tools that will help. I was told the puppet tool would be very helpful for this project so I found a great tutorial for it from lyndia.com on youtube. I also found a principles of animation video that brings some theory to animation movement. These elements have been very helpful when building this infographic project.
 

Tutorial : Underwater

For one of my animation projects I wanted the setting to be underwater. I went on youtube to see if I could find any good tutorials and I came across this one. It’s a very helpful tutorial that captures the essence of being underwater. It goes as far as to create the light from the sun shining in through the water and shows you how to make realistic looking bubbles. I definitely recommend this tutorial if you are trying to create this scene. 

Catch me if you can opening titles

Below I have attached a link to the opening titles of the movie catch me if you can. I really liked the opening credits to this movie as they were simplistic but still very appealing to the viewer. The titles themselves played a out a simple narrative of their own which helped introduce the story to viewer. Aside from the meaning of the titles, the titles themselves were exceptionally well done. The interesting ways to shape letters through shapes and different patterns was very interesting. I can see that the basics that were using in class through after effects can be applied to make titles similar to these. While watching, I was able to see the possibilities of how it was created through various effects that we have seen in class. I hope that people watch this and enjoy it, as it is very entertaining in itself. 

 

Face on Inanimate Object Effect

I recently found a fun and easy tutorial on ae.tutsplus.com on how to add your face onto an inanimate object. Also, with the Golden Doorknobs competition coming up, I'm really thinking about possible creative ideas to put together. With this, I could give doorknobs a personality of their own and make something really unique. Just a thought.... anyways, here's the example video the tutorial provides:

The full tutorial can be seen on the ae tutsplus website:

http://ae.tutsplus.com/tutorials/vfx/put-your-face-onto-an-inanimate-object/?search_index=6

It seems like a fun trick to know in general. It also helped me understand motion tracking a little better.
Enjoy the link and good luck everyone!

After Effects - Music and Visualization

So after Thursday's class I kept playing around with some of the expressions that we had worked with, and was interested in expanding the music pairing's that we had made. After getting absolutely nowhere for a while, I went onto Youtube and started looking for tutorials of different cool things to do with music in After Effects. I came across these two videos:

I chose to post these two because the music in each varies, so I thought it would be cool to compare them both. I haven't found a tutorial yet, mostly because after I found these I spent a bunch of time watching other music visualizations created in After Effects.

Motion Graphics, easier said then done.

As we dove right into AfterEffects this week, I came to grasp how complex motion graphics actually is.    Before this class, I watched title sequences and would just be able to comment how cool it looked.  Now I am starting to grasp the long hours of hard, tedious work these artist put in.

 Our assignment for next class is to animate our names.  I am excited that we are getting right into AfterEffects, but I hope I can remember how to do it all.  It is one thing to be able to animate your name, it is another thing to animate your name well.  It will be fun to play around in AfterEffects, I just hope I don't get lost in the key frames.

One of the most incredible opening title sequences I have ever seen is the opening of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  The opening creates this epic, yet disturbing, tone.  I love the dark color schemes and pictures created out of the splashing metal liquid.  This would be a fun (yet extremely difficult) concept for my name animation!

Blog 1: Motion Graphics Introduction

Last semester I took a mini-course in After Effects and it really opened my eyes to the limitless possibilities of animation and graphic movement.  I know the very basics of After Effects but I can't wait to make a title sequence with this program.  I have always been in love with the Mad Men opening and would love to create something like that for my new television show on ICTV this semester.  The title sequence always sets the tone for a television show.  It can make or break the number of eyes on your content.  If you can't captivate an audience in the first 30-45 seconds, you're essentially done.  I am looking to hone my skills in After Effects but most importantly I am looking to use these skills to entertain.  You can "know" an editing program, but still lack creativity and captivation.  Below I have attached a link to the Mad Men opening.  In my opinion, it entices the viewer and creates the perfect amount of suspense to see what the show has in store for them.

http://vimeo.com/4877093

Fun with Particles

So last class I was really intrigued by the particle playground effect we used for the smoke. I started looking around and there are a number of different particle generators in after effects. I guess we'll just have to play with them all to see what is best. Anyway, there are a ton of different functions a particle generator could have. Immediately I thought about snow or precipitation or things like that. I began to look for some tutorials and I found a very cool and pretty easy to do one on video copilot. It is using a particle generating effect called trapcode particular to make cold breath. He alters a lot of the effect setting in order to make the breath realistic and it looks really cool. He also did a quick color correction to make the scene look like it was really cold, turning up the blues and what not. I thought it was pretty cool and definitely practical if you needed to shoot a cold weather scene and we happened to be having unseasonably warm weather.

Motion Graphic Typography

I was looking into some different uses of typography in a motion graphics sequence when I came across a video that had a pretty simple design but still managed to look pretty cool.

It had a nice layout of characters in the video, and the pacing, tempo, and flow of the entire video worked nicely. The video in its entirety is featured below:





I was even more encouraged when I looked at the artist's portfolio and saw not only that he was a student himself (in Australia), but is proficient in AfterEffects, which I'm assuming he used to create the sequence. For the artist's website and entire portfolio, click here.

Final Post

Well, since it's the end of the semester, I thought I would follow the common theme and do one final post about what most of us have spent all semester working on, opening titles. It's pretty amazing the appreciation 4 months of AfterEffects can give you for the few minutes that come at the beginning of a television show or film. I think we all can agree that it's a lot more effort than we probably expected, and some films in particular have opening sequences that are not only done to perfection, but incredibly memorable.

The photo above shows some of the greatest opening sequences from today and years past, from Vertigo to Catch Me If You Can. A nice list of some of the best opening can be found here. I'm sure someone at one point or another has posted that website, but regardless it's always worth a second look!

This is my final "assignment" before I am officially done at Ithaca College, so I'd like to hope all of you the best of luck whether it's as a student next semester, working in the spring, and last but not least, being a professor at IC! I had a lot of fun.

Phantom Video Link

I'm not sure why the embedded video in my last post isn't working, so here's the link. Sorry about that. :/

If anyone knows of any tutorials that talk about making flickering lights in AfterEffects or goes in-depth about the Stroke effect when making titles, let me know. :)

Phantom of the Opera- Titles Project

So I'm currently trying to come up with an outline for how I want to do the Phantom of the Opera opening titles. The movie (the 2004 version) doesn't have full titles, just the title of the movie and a zoom into a picture as they start the film. Here's the actual opening for the movie.

I really like the candle/flickering light theme that have going on, and I'd like to expand that at least for part of my opening titles. I'm using part of the music that's played over the final scrolling credits for the movie, which is about 2:20 in length. Now I'm just trying to figure out what I want to have appear at what time and what names to put in the credits (after I get through the main cast members, director, etc). I'm also a little worried that I face a big learning curve when it comes to making the names show up and making that light flicker. I'm currently trying to look for Video Copilot tutorials that fit what I'm looking for, but I can't find any great ones at the moment. I think I'll be using a lot of Write-On/Stroke effects and playing around with keyframes on the lights.

I'm hoping I can get through the outlining process soon so I can start putting elements together and seeing if this will actually work. We'll see how it goes...

Puppet Tool

Since we spent the last week making our little moving birds to animate a landscape image, I decided to look further into ways to animate other still images. I found a tutorial that gave a pretty brief overview of the Puppet tool used in AfterEffects. Essentially, you set joints on an image, preferably a PNG file, and it allows for an organic movement, hinging the image in two places.


I have never actually used this tool in AfterEffects, but I was interested in the way not only you could move a part of a still image, but AfterEffects automatically makes the motion of the image flow so well by shifting the other parts of the image around it.
Since this video was done by what sounds like a 12-year old boy, I decided to see if Andrew Kramer had any more in-depth tutorials using the puppet tool. While he had none specific to it, he did include use of it in this lengthy and interesting tutorial using green screens and a car crash. You can find the video here.