This is a great website that contains tons of After Effects scripts. These are scripts that have been written by other people and sold online. The scripts vary in price: some free, some expensive, some where you can name your own price and question how much of a cheapskate you are. There are effects like many of the plugins you come across, but many just help with productivity and quickly doing things that would normally eat up time. The scripts and plugins vary in type and program and can be very useful. Check them out when you get a chance. They can inspire ideas, or click in your mind when you see how convenient something can be.
Someone posted this article on Facebook. For people who are just getting into After Effects animation, this can be helpful when designing assets. Photoshop is great for some things but it is raster based meaning things created in it are a set pixel ratio, and scaling it up will reduce the quality. Illustrator is vector based so your images basically have infinite resolution. Because the two programs are both made by Adobe they work very well together, so making adjustments to an imported illustrator asset file, will show up in your After Effects project. Illustrator is also a more advanced tool as far as asset design in many ways, because that is really what it is meant to do, while After Effects is primarily a compositing program. Consider using illustrator to design your assets and export and import them into your After Effects project. Especially for more detailed objects. And check out the article if you want. It just gives some advice on asset creation and proper importing of layers and what not.
The Transformers trilogy is absolutely awful. Like most of Michael Bay's 'films' they are one-dimensional action flicks trying to disguise themselves as something more meaningful. Sorry Bay, but you're not fooling anyone. There's not a single Bay film that I have found cinematically pleasing, nor have I ever found a reason to commend the director, except for one exception.
While I do not necessarily agree with Bay's style of filming or directing, there is at least one thing he's done right all these years (besides managing to perfectly resemble Michael Bolton): hiring an excellent team of visual effects specialists. More specifically, I'm talking about the Transformers movies. While I find them to be terribly painful to watch, there is certainly something to admire about the films. The visual effects behind the absurdly complicated alien robots is simply breathtaking.
To start off, Destroyer, an enormously impressive creation found in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, took 72 hours to render...per frame! Pretty crazy, huh? Let's be honest, though. Anyone can make something that takes weeks to render. That's not the impressive part. The impressive part is that the single Transformer was put together by 6-8 individually created, incredibly detailed vehicles. Imagine how long that would take you to create. Now, imagine how long that would take you to create a second time once your director told you it wasn't good enough. I can only assume you'd be pretty upset with that news. Essentially, the animators were instructed to go back and make the machines twice as detailed as it already was, and THEN to reconstruct the final robot with all 6-8 individual pieces.
Another kudos for Bay goes to his ability to bring in practical visual effects. On the set of Transformers 2, Bay was able to bring in a sizable number of military vehicles (tanks, bombers, F16s, you name it) to fly over set, drop flares, and just add some level of believability to his otherwise ludicrous film. Bay is also a fan of on-set explosions. They're dangerous, yes, but they make for one hell of an effect. It also saves quite a bit of postproduction time and effort. Speaking for anyone who's ever worked postproduction on a film, we all greatly appreciate it.
Bringing it back to postproduction visual effects, the aircraft carrier scene of Transformers 2 is also quite an impressive feat. I never really gave it much thought, but much more than most people would ever expect went into this scene. The team shot actual burning miniatures and debris with blue screens that were later composited into the completed animations. The people on the carriers were a mix of animations and people who were shot tumbling and falling. The aircraft were created by the animators as well. Basically, thousands of pieces were created for this scene simply to be destroyed over the course of a minute. It's like being a kid again after taking hours to build a LEGO model just to have your younger brother completely and utterly demolish it.
Animation is a crazy field to go into. It's often the defining point between a film's success and it's downfall. In Michael Bay's case, it's really the only thing he was able to do correctly.
Friday, April 5, 2013
HOLOGRAMS
This technology is quite incredible. The dream of the future and what it holds has always been an exciting idea for people. Fifty years ago, there was no such thing as television and just the idea of a box that has moving pictures on it was considered crazy. Now, holographic technology is developing and potentially something that will be accessible to the public in the future. Adding a whole new dimension to the idea of holograms, this Japanese company is using ultrasonic emitters to add the sensation of pressure and thus touch. As mentioned in the video, the applications for this are endless and could really revolutionize our lives and the future.
