Newton for After Effects

Newton is an awesome plugin for After Effects that simulates 2D physics. As someone who has worked with 3D programs such as Cinema 4D where simulating physics is very smoothly built in and advance, this plugin is a great crossover. Instead of key-framing a ball bouncing for example and trying to make it look as real as possible, Newton allows you to tweak real world physics properties of your objects and simulate real physics. It is great for having things that react to gravity such as objects falling. You can set objects as static and all objects will collide with each other automatically, which is very handy. The plugin has tons of possibilities, which I look forward to exploring, and I have been using some on my third project.

The program is $250 but you can get a free trial and try it for yourself. Here is the website, and here is where you can download it. I highly recommend you check it out.

End-of-semester Reflection

Motion Graphics and Animation was exactly how difficult I imagined it to be. I didn't think it would be easy at all and I knew going into the class that I had absolutely no knowledge of After Effects, Maya, or anything related to stop-motion animation. But I'm proud of myself for giving it my best shot and at least attempting to use all three.

I used to think I wanted to have a career in animation (because I love animated movies), but now I know that industry is just not a good fit for me. What I like about animated movies and television shows is that anything is possible. You're only limited to what you can come up with in terms of characters and the world they live in. I am taking Program Development this semester as well and I've learned that story development is much more my style than actual production. (I also kind of learned this after taking Fiction Field 2, but that's a whole other story).

Another thing I learned about myself this semester that is completely unrelated to this class is that I really love working with and helping people. Feeling like what my job is significant in someone else's life is important to me. This semester I started teaching group fitness classes at the Fitness Center and I absolutely love it. I'm going to study over the summer to become a certified personal trainer. So I guess if I were to relate this to animation, I would rather work with voice actors than actually animate the production.

As I look towards the future, I don't regret taking this class at all. I learned a lot and now I highly respect everyone in the animation field, even more than I did before. If I apply to intern at an animation studio when I study in Los Angeles, I will most likely apply to be a part of their development team.

Typography & Motion Graphics After Effects Tutorial

This is a basic tutorial on typography that I thought is really easy to follow along. Typography is such a fascinating use of animation, you can create and do just about anything with it. The way it all flows together is almost like creating its own story, its so interesting! There is so many examples of it on YouTube that I definitely recommend checking out.

Processing

Arutro told me about a really interesting program that is worth exploring, especially if you have any interest or background in programming and computer science. The site describes the program as: "Processing is a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code within the context of the visual arts. Since 2001, Processing has promoted software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology." Basically it is a program that allows you to create art, motion graphics, among hundreds of other applications. The site contains a variety of examples of some of the basic uses. This is one that changes the hue as you drag your mouse across it. Below, you are given the code that makes it work, and it is often surprising how simple the basic stuff is. The language is based on java so if you are good with that program you should feel right at home. Download the program and try entering and tweaking some of the sample code if you are interested. It is a really cool concept and the possibilities are endless. Here are some exhibition examples of work people have done.

Real World Animation Tutorials

You may have seen these videos on Vine or Facebook or somewhere. This guy Arron is a talented motion graphics editor who uses After Effects to make real world animations.

This is just another example of how advanced you can get with After Effects. He has a full tutorial on his After Effects techniques for this type of realistic, real world animation. It is not free ($50), but these techniques are extremely useful for advancing your realistic motion graphics abilities.

Check out his site for more information, other tutorials including free ones, other examples of his real-world animation videos, and more.

Professional Uses of After Effects

A lot of production companies and video game development companies design their own in-house software to accommodate their needs, such as Pixar. However, even these studios use publicly accessible software such as After Effects to do things we assume were made on far fancier software.

Here is a video from Adobe's site detailing the use of After Effects as a major editing tool for the movies Iron Man 3 and Oblivion. Its cool to see how within reach the professional level methods and motion graphics are, for those of us advancing our varying levels of motion graphics abilities. (Adobe has some other great videos relating to After Effects and their other products that are worth looking through.)

Meow

The inspiration for this week's blog goes out to my cat, Pepper.  At seven in the morning, and at five in the afternoon, Pepper likes to remind me that it is time for him to eat.  Like any hungry individual, he expresses his hunger quite vocally, so it's a routine that we have both gotten used to.  However, today Pepper's dedicated plea's reminded me of a video that I happened to stumble upon a few years ago.  Created by a well known youtuber, named "cyriak," this video combines music and motion graphics to create a rather abstract, and somewhat unsettling music video simply of his cat meowing.  I'm not sure what his exact technique was, but it combines manipulating images, and moving around parts of the cat's body to make it look like there are multiples of the cat, as well as movements that don't look too lifelike.  Check it out, because it's pretty cool:

While you're at it, you should check out his other videos too, because they're amazing.  Great work at manipulating what your eyes see.

Most Used Motion Graphics Techniques

This week while browsing reddit, I found a blog post that summarized the top 25 techniques that motion graphics artists use to make simple videos look better. Some of these techniques I had practiced in the past, while some of these were completely new to me. It’s a good checklist to go through if you’re looking for ways to make a plain video look better, and I will definitely check this list before finalizing videos in the future. The link can be found here, and it’s a url that I have bookmarked for future use. /r/aftereffects has provided me with lots of valuable posts, and I plan on using these posts in the future as a valuable source of learning. 

Video Copilot's New Saber Plugin

A few days ago, Video Copilot released a new After Effects plugin called Saber. Video Copilot founder Andrew Kramer recently finished working on the visual effects team for Star Wars VII, and although he didn’t do any work on the actual lightsabers, he was inspired to create an After Effects plugin to make the process easy. Saber is an effect that can be applied to a color solid in order to create a beam of light. The beam has a core and an outer glow, each with a whole host of controls that allow you to tweak each part however you like. It can also be set to match mask shapes, which makes it incredibly easy to work with. There are over 50 different presets that come with Saber, each with a unique look/feel. I’m currently messing around with Saber in my name project, hoping to learn more about it for future use. Some animations I’ve found on Reddit that use Saber include this portal that resembles the Portal video game series, this Diet Coke bottle, and this neon text. Saber is available for a free on Video Copilot’s website.

MoGraph for Bernie Inspired MoGraph for Me

This week, I was browsing reddit when I came across an interesting post. It came from one of my newest subscriptions on reddit - r/AfterEffects. The post, titled “MoGraph video I made for Bernie”, gave me an interesting idea as to how I could apply some of my new skills. The video takes the normally visually unappealing topic of voting statistics and used motion graphics to bring some life to the numbers. I thought this was an excellent way of keeping an audience interested and involved with a topic that might have otherwise been bland or boring. Inspired by this post, I have decided to work on a video for The Ithacan that follows the same style - using nothing but motion graphics and voiceover. One thing I am somewhat nervous about is the amount of time this may take. We usually try to get videos posted at the same time as their accompanying article. This would give me 5 days to get all the facts I need, make the entire video, get it criticized and fixed up, then finalized and posted. I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to make the tight deadline, but it is something that I’m definitely interested in trying and I’m up for the challenge.

Cinema 4D

Cinema 4D is a similar program to Maya. It is not as mainstream as Maya, but has some features and usability benefits I have not found in Maya. Coming from Cinema 4D it was difficult learning Maya. I felt like someone had hid and relabeled all my tools. But I'm glad I am relatively comfortable with both.

While I have only barely scratched the surface in my Maya class, I can tell there is a difference in the workflow between the two programs, and I vastly prefer the Cinema 4D flow, at least for my purposes. Like After Effects, I feel like everything I do in Cinema 4D is reversible and less permanent than in Maya. For example in Maya, to boolean two objects, you align the two, click them in the right order, and hit boolean. This permanently modifies the geometry and you are set. In Cinema 4D, you drag a boolean folder-like object into your objects list (called the outliner in Maya). You then put the two objects as inside the boolean folder. They instantly subtract but when you move the object that is subtracting around, it adjusts the boolean live and can be adjust later. This is one of the many easy of use benefits I have found in Cinema 4D over Maya.

Cinema 4D has its own Andrew Kramer-like site called Greyscale Gorilla. They make plugins, and downloadable lighting and texture setups as well as offer many easy to follow tutorials. Cinema 4D is around $3,695 but offers a student program, although it is elaborate to enroll in. I highly recommend the program.

Check out Cinema 4D

Check out Greyscale Gorilla

The Ithacan New Lower Thirds

I recently was able to use After Effects for my first project outside of this class. It was a fairly simple animation, but I made a new lower third for use in The Ithacan multimedia videos. This is my first semester working as Assistant Multimedia Editor for the Ithacan and one of the first things I noticed was the visually unappealing lower thirds. I brought this up with the rest of the multimedia team and we decided it was time for a change. Here is an example of the old lower third, and here is the new animation in use. While it’s nothing flashy or fancy, I was glad to be able to start applying my new After Effects skills. Upcoming in the near future is also a new intro/outro clip for The Ithacan as well.

Goals

Someone at the production company I interned at, shared the reel of a Norwegian motion graphics artist named Marcus Eckert. His motion graphics skills are extremely impressive. There are two abilities you have to have to be a successful motion graphics artist. Ideas and mechanics. Just because you know the program, doesn't mean you have the creative mind to come up with a design that successfully works with the project. And of course if you have ideas, you have to be able to implement them and make them come to life. This guy can do both, and I aspire to reach his level. Check him out:

Enmeshed from Marcus Eckert on Vimeo.

Lighting Up Gaga's Face at the Grammy's

The Grammy’s were this past weekend, although I didn’t watch it, I stumbled upon a clip from the Lady Gaga tribute performance for David Bowie who passed earlier this year. The beginning of the tribute starts out with a tight shot of Lady Gaga’s face. Red paint “drips” down her face and makes the infamous Bowie lightning bolt over her left eye. From the same eye sprouts a spider that then crawls around her face. After completing a loop it turns into an orb that glows and stays place on her forehead. The lights go dim and she walks onto the main stage to finish the performance. 

Although this was only a less than one minute long, it’s still impressive they were able to apply animations on to a moving face during a live performance, be it digitally or via projection. Personally I feel as if the motion tracking was done via projection because near the end of the section you could see an extra set of eyes as well as the animation being slightly off while Lady Gaga’s movements gain more momentum. I also feel it was done via projection because for a live audience that would be more exciting than watching a screen. 

The big give away about the motion tracking and the fact that it was done live were the silver dots that were on the upper portion of Lady Gaga’s face throughout the entire performance. As we all know, or should all know by now, these dots act as tracking points in order for the animation to “stay put” on Lady Gaga’s face even while she moves about.

All in all this was a great tribute performance for the late David Bowie, and the animation in the beginning was very nice touch. Check it out!

Animation for Beginners

These past few weeks have felt like a foreign country to me. The animations that we have learned through After Effects have been helpful but it seems to me that I'm learning a lot slower than the others. I've been watching tutorials and trying to keep up in class, but I always seem to be a little farther behind. I would love to set a goal to be able to get better at animation and After Effects throughout the next few ways. I've gotten used to key frames and simple animations, but beyond that, I need to try a little bit harder and work towards getting better sooner rather than later.

Strange Motion within Emperor's New Clothes

Animation and motion graphics in music videos is another factor that has drawn me to animation. There are many creative ways motion graphics and animation can be used in order create visually striking images, especially within the realm of music videos. In music videos very little has to make sense and therefore a whole hodgepodge of images and animation can come up.

         A friend of mine recently told me to watch Panic at the Disco’s music video for their song “Emperor’s New Clothes”, not only because the song is kind of cool but the video itself is very intriguing. As someone analyzing the plethora of ways the music video was made, a couple conclusions have came to my mind.

         The first thing I noticed was the strange and intricate use of stop motion through out the music video. Although the stop motion is most noticeable during the shots of the skulls “singing”, it is sprinkled throughout and subtly shown through Brendon Urie’s actions as he moves around the scene.

         Another affect that is shown within this music video that could either be very intense make up details or just animation techniques is when Urie’s skin starts to chance color and texture as well as the growing of the horns and other strange bodily things. Although after the full transformation is complete it is definitely completely make up, but the fluctuation that happens with his skin while these things are growing out of him are, at least, in my opinion, due to animation.

            Regardless of how creepy this video kind of is, It’s still pretty cool and Panic at the Disco is definitely still one of my favorite artists. So yeah! Check out the video below if you want to experience it yourself.

My First Day of After Effects

Before this week, I’ve had almost no experience with After Effects and this is something that I would really like to change. I’ve been messing around with a few fun projects as well as watching lots of Video Copilot tutorials this week, and I’m only just starting to get a taste of the really cool things After Effects can do. While watching one of these tutorials, an idea came to me - I should spend a little bit of time each week working on a small, fun side project as a way to track my experience with After Effects. By the end of the semester, I’ll be able to look back and see how my skills have progressed (and probably laugh at how poor my work was at the start). For that reason I’ve uploaded my first animation of this series to Youtube.

My project this week was made on the night of our first class session. It’s simply a solid blue cube changing position, size, and rotation using keyframes. I used the “Easy Ease” option in the Keyframe Assistant to give the the cube more realistic physics, i.e. nonlinear speed (picks up speed gradually and slows down as it approaches the next point). Easy Ease is something that I picked up from Video Copilot, and it was very easy to understand and to use. I think that if I stick with those tutorials, I will be able to learn a lot of useful tips and tricks fairly quickly.

Animation is impressive

Coming into this Motion Graphics and Animation class, I can confidently say I know nothing about animating. I've never used After Effects or Maya before, but I plan on being able to improve my skills throughout the next few months of the year. Animated movies have always been a very important part of my life, especially Pixar and Disney movies, and I have always found animators to be some of the most talented people. When I was in London, I had an internship at Objective Productions, where one part of it was finding facts about different animated movies, including Shrek, Frozen and Bambi. It was interesting to view the commentary on how they created Frozen, a very recent Disney film to how they animated Bambi, the first Disney film ever created. The content that I viewed showed me the evolution of cartoon animation and how everything used to be drawn by hand while now everything is digitally animated and it can take days just to animate a characters hair! Overall, animation is something that I really admire, and I am excited to become more knowledgeable on how to create certain things for all of the projects that we are going to do in class.

Here is the link to the Frozen documentary I watched: 

https://vimeo.com/105934014

And here is the documentary on Bambi I watched: 

The Evolution of My Animation Skills

Flashback to August and our first class, I was excited to learn about Motion Graphics and Animation but admittedly, quite overwhelmed. I had never touched After Effects before, let alone Maya or Cinema 4D. The first few classes I was able to keep up with the basics. Quickly, though, I found myself trailing behind--not because I wasn't capable of what we were doing, but simply because the keyboard commands and programs as a whole were so foreign. 

It was a tough start getting going but the key is practice. I know that sounds redundant and obvious, but as your basic knowledge grows the better you're able to understand more complex concepts. 

Now, I'm much more confident in my skills. I'm able to watch simple animations and figure out at least conceptually how it's done. My knowledge in regards to the many different effects these programs offer has grown immensely and keyframing is now second nature.  

Just take a look at how my name animation has evolved.

My point in writing this is to encourage any newcomers who might be taking this course next semester, or someone who maybe has interest in the topic but finds the idea daunting. Do I see myself becoming an animator in the future? Not particularly. But I think the skill set you gain in understanding this type of media is incredibly useful no matter what branch of production you find yourself in. 

Happy Animating!

Title Sequence Madness

So while this Title sequence project is the bane of my existence and is the hardest project I have done in this class, it is still definitely my favorite project that I have done this semester.

This project is a very long and hard process that I am still not completely finished with even as I write this post. But I have kind of loved every minute of it. And that isn't even because I love animating in After Effects that much (I mean I like it, but it is not my favorite activity). But I am very excited about how it is going to turn out.

So I started out this project thinking I was going to remake the title sequence for To Kill A Mockingbird, however after really thinking about my skill level, I decided that was totally not going to work. So instead I decided to go with my own new version of the Avengers end title sequence. And while yes, I know, the Marvel titles are all really cool and super 3D and crazy complicated, mine is not like that at all. I know that mine is a very simple 2D small scale kind of thing, but I really like how it looks and I am excited to finish it. I also think it looks pretty good for my skill level.