After effects development

I wanted the beginning to be more relaxing and slower than the rest of the video. I went through a lot of my old videos and tried out loads of different things. In the end I decided on a clip of birds flying against a clear blue sky. I was really happy with the way the opening eyes revealed the birds. I haven’t decided yet if I want the birds to be on both screens or just the one. Either way one of the screens will soon be filled with other things. I know that the rest of the video will be one screen for one video and the other would be filled with random stuff. This also means I have a bit less editing and can focus on making the other screen overwhelming with hopefully many effects. It took me awhile to decide on all the big screen filling videos, but I decided on the birds, white water rafting, me looking into a mirror, a short one form scouts, and one of laura against the sky. Laura had filmed that video of me in the mirror originally as a test for the experimental media. Also the one where I paint a cross on my arm is Flora´s.

To keep myself more organised I decided to colour code all the clips (cause there are so many of them). The very beginning sequence with the eyes opening and the birds is a light blue. The lions and elephants are sandstone. The rafting green. The mirror pink (I have pink on my tshirt). The last that are dominated by the sky are blue. My solid layers like the bubbles and eyelids are red. All the other elements will be labelled according to the video are next to. It will take awhile to go through everything though, as I decided to do this a bit late. I keep having problems with things being on top of thing they shouldn´t be on top of and so I need to be able to find everything quickly and easily. That’s why I´m labelling and naming all the files.


On top of pictures and videos that I´ve taken off my laptop, I´m also taking stuff off my phone and off the internet. I want there to be a mixture of social media notifications, messages, and news headlines. I also want social media logos like the Instagram logo. I saved everything I wanted to an album on my laptop and then edited the backgrounds in photoshop. Sometimes this was really quick and easy, sometimes there were harder bits to get off. I also had the occasional wrong format problem. You can see in the pictures below how I edited things below.

Once I imported them into After Effects I had to cut off the bits I didn´t want with the pen tool. Like if I had a picture with several notifications I made it so you could only see one and import it again for the rest of the messages. I don´t know if this is the fastest way to work, but I don’t know any other way.

Youtube videos have been a great help. I´m not sure yet what I want to do with the text on a path as I can´t seem to get the hands, but I´ve figured it out anyway. I´ve also watched how to make paths, how to use the liquify effect and colour correction. I am slowly learning how to use After Effects.

I´ve had some problems with my laptop being too slow. I think it´s partly because I´m bringing in so many different elements and then trying to add effects to some of them. It´s hard to work with it when the play back moves so slowly, even though my quality is at a third. I can´t really tell how things look or what a certain effect does etc. I also keep having to adjust where things are, as they go on top of things they shouldn’t. When I originally place them they see fine but at some point when the playback is not so laggy I see that there is a tiny moment when things are not as they should be. The picture below shows that.

To try to see how my video looks without it taking ten minutes to play through the on minute I have I tried to export it. Unfortunately that didn’t go well at all. For some reason it had cut off the last twenty seconds, all my videos that I had taken off my phone were going insane and I also seem to be running out storage.

I have now deleted loads of videos and other files off my laptop and put them onto a hardrive. Hopefully that will make it easier for After Effects to run. 

It did not help, and it was still very slow and laggy. I got so frustrated with it that I gave up for a bit and decided to edit some audio. I wanted the audio to be annoying and towards the end feel a bit messy. I also wanted it to feel a little disconnected from the film. (social media and real life being separate). 


The next export I tried was the full minute long but more then half of it was just black. I tried again and that was also mostly blank and even the bits that were running were sped up and glitchy. The next one I tried complained again about space, even though I had deleted so much stuff off my laptop, and it also cut to be only 20 seconds and that too was partly sped up and glitchy. I tried looking it up and changing my settings, but it didn’t seem to help. I emailed Anne about this and and she was very understanding and suggested a couple of things for me to try. I decided to try and get as much of it as possible together onto premiere. I actually got the whole film onto it and then I just had to edit little bits, like occasionally there would be a second of emptiness. Even though it is not the finished thing, I´m still happy that in the end I did get a video file to give in.

(This post is getting long so I will continue in another on)