DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND IMAGING - WEEK 9

 May 24th (WEEK 9)

NG VEYHAN (0349223) / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND IMAGING

WEEK 9

---

Lecture

Mr. Yusoff covered the basics of animating with After Effects and gave us a rough demo on the process we were supposed to go with in order to complete this assignment.

---

Practical

Downloading the .psd file from the provided drive link, I imported the file into After Effects as a composition, and prepared the layers for individual editing.

First, I wanted to create a transition for the typewriter to be the first element to appear in the composition. I opted for a basic fade in by using a keyframed opacity. I felt that it looked very boring, and I added a ripple effect as it appears to give it a little extra punch.

(Fig 01, Typewriter Animation, 28/5/2021)

The second element that I wanted to tackle was the fencer in the composition. I decided to play with rotation, position and scaling in order to create a left and right rotation creating something similar to footsteps. 

(Fig 02, Fencer Animation, 28/5/2021)

The animation initially had a completely linear velocity, which made the animations move in a very "robotic" manner. I was aware of the velocity graph from my time with Premiere Pro and used it here as well. It was placed differently than what I am used to and took me a while to find it.

(Fig 03, Charting Velocity, 28/5/2021)

The shark had a simple movement involving rotating around an anchor point placed on the center of the composition. It would then rotate into the correct position after the fencer had completed its animation.

The projector was last, I used masking to hide it while it moved from a lower position to its final position. Masking was odd in After Effects as it had to be mapped onto an effect rather than having it applied on an element directly.

(Fig 04, Masking, 28/5/2021)

Final Video

Link to the Video: https://youtu.be/0AA8WnJtD_E

---

Feedback and Reflection

Feedback: Mr. Yusoff praised my use of some more advanced techniques in After Effects, in particularly the motion ace function.

Reflection: The exercise for this week wasn't terribly hard as it only involved basic edits such as position and scaling. The hardest part would be trying to mask an object. I had trouble with that until I referred to the lecture recording. I do look forward to the more advanced classes involving After Effects as I feel there's a lot of avenues for creativity with it.