After effects final
After getting my idea and sort of planning it, I began to think more specifically of what I wanted to learn, and what I should
add into it. I made a list of the things I wanted from project:
·
Not only to randomly play around
with After Effects, I want to actually learn the program. For this I´ll watch
tutorials on YouTube of things that I have no idea how to do
·
Do at least a short 3D sequence.
It´s something I´ve never done before but really want to learn. Either camera
movement or lights with 3D objects
·
For the beginning/
travelling sequence I want it to feel spacey
·
For the middle part I´m not
sure what effects yet, but maybe leaves/trees/flowers
·
For disco/ end part I might
make a disco ball or have someone dance on a floor
·
Move to beats of music of
course
·
Colour changing over time
The first thing I did then, was to look for effects on YouTube
that I wanted to use. I chose a couple and followed the tutorials. That´s how I
made the swirly purple, blue and pink and the swimming pool effect. I was happy
with both of them, but most proud of the swirly effect. There was quite a lot
of stages to do that, whereas the pool is basically just one effect. I took a
screenshot of the swirly effect:
After I had done a couple of the background effects, I just began to build on that and base a lot of it on the music as well. As planned before my video is sort of split into three sections: The travelling through stars, the pool and the party scene. I did also sort of end up having a fourth random end bit just because I wanted to have a nice and minimal graphic part.
Travelling through stars
I played around with a couple of different effects to find ones I liked.
I spent ages on the stars below but ended up not liking it at all. The way it
moved made me feel sick and it didn’t even look cool, so I deleted it :)). I did a couple of effects like this that I ended up deleting.
I finally decided
to just do another swirly purple thing for the beginning with some stars moving
towards us, to make it feel like we are moving forwards. (I had tried making a similar
star effect before so it was already kind of familiar). I also wanted the stars
to move to the music so I did the keyframe assistant – scale thing, but I do not
think you can really tell that well.
I considered
adding a frame around the edges, but I decided it looked too weird.
To begin with my swirly effect didn’t swirl
towards the middle, because I didn´t want it to be too similar as my other one.
It felt like it was missing something, though so in the end I did it anyway and
I´m glad I did. I like the way it sort of looks like a tunnel and how the
colours mix together. I also added a lighter blue in the middle of the swirl to
connect with the next scene, which is the pool. I´m happy with how it ended up
looking.
If you watch the
very first version I exported (Out of about 13 😊) you can see how I changed it over time:
The Pool
For the pool
effect I followed a tutorial, and it was actually quite easy. I knew I´d also
want the “blob” to appear in the middle, on the beat so I added that. For that too I
used the keyframe assistant- scale and I even did a bit of encoding to try to
make it look smoother. Then I decided to make the colours change in the blob as
that was one of the things I wanted to try and I thought it would go well at
this point. To begin with the blob was just a simple from one colour to the
other, but then I somehow managed to make it flash in different colours and I
honestly don’t know how. I liked it though so I kept it, but as I did want to
also have a colour sliding effect, I put one on the pool.
Next I added the
yellow frame. I had experimented before with the wave warp (on my other blog
post) and I had also added a frame to the very beginning before deleting it. I
thought it would be fun to keep it for here though. I made it a bright yellow
to contrast the blue. As soon as I did that it made me think of David Hockney.
Hockney is one of
my favourite artists. I love his colours, simple compositions and his pools. I had a look
at some of his paintings and it inspired me to make my own swimmer character
for the video.
I took the shape
of the swimmer on the last painting to make mine.
I wanted to add
some colour, so I gave her a bright red swimsuit and a bright yellow swim cap. I
made one a little transparent so that you could see the swimming pool effect
and it would look more like she was actually underwater. The other was just the
original colours. I tried them both on the composition and decided I liked the
original one more. It looked better and brighter. I did them on my iPad with a watercolour
brush.
I then had a hell
of a time trying to make them all move at the same time. It seemed so simple,
yet I spent so much time trying to get it right. It felt like each time I fixed
one thing two other problems would come up. Mainly I think it was just that I
kept accidentally making new keyframes, so the swimmers would wobble around
weirdly and leave at different times. I must of “fixed” it five times and only
once it was rendered did I see that it one or two of them were not synchronised
or were going backwards. When I finally finished it though I was super happy
with it. I felt like I had created my own moving Hockney painting. For a long
time as well the pool sequence stayed empty because I couldn’t figure out what
to add to it. This was the perfect solution and I´m proud I put up with so many
errors. The swimmer also became an important character throughout my video. She sort of guides us through all the stages.
The
Disco
The disco bit of
the video ended up being the one where I experimented with 3D. That part became my least favourite. It didn´t work out the way I wanted it to and it
doesn´t look particularly aesthetic. I did learn how to use a 3D space and how
to control the lights though, so that´s the main thing.
One of the things
that really annoyed me and that I couldn’t figure out was why my blob had gone
colourless. I wanted it to be pink and it was before I turned it into a 3D
object. I tried googling it, watching tutorials, changing the material and
colour of it but nothing worked. In the end I gave up as I thought it wasn’t the most important.
Another thing
that I didn’t get to do is put a floor down. I tried to but that also went
completely black and faded as if it didn´t exist. At this point though I was starting
to run out of time so I decided again, that it wasn´t that important.
I´m happy I
managed to make a 3D object move to the music and that it casts shadows and
caught the lights. I think it´s really cool to be able to do that, even if I couldnt do the rest.
I added quite a
few lights and they were all very random. In the end I made sure they were all
moving the whole time (except for the main blue spotlight) so it wouldn’t look
too weird. I also made some of the lights colour changing. I used every kind of
light there was except ambient didn´t make it to the final cut. At least now I
know what they all do. Next time I´ll figure out the colour.
Of course, I also
have the part where I tried to make David Bowie morph out of my blob. I thought
it would be very simple, but after I watched several tutorials, I realised it
wasn´t. At some point I gave up thinking it would never work, but then it
started to. It still looks pretty bad and not smooth at all but I find it´s
quite funny so I left it. I managed to make it much better than I expected it
to, so I´m quite happy with it. It was meant to morph from the blob to Bowie
and back to the blob but I had so many issues with it I didn´t make him morph
back into the blob. I almost managed to make it but the size and placing didn´t
match with the next scene anyway so I thought it wasn´t worth it. I had David
Bowie getting fat and going into a round, not really what I was looking for. So yes
I deleted that part of it and let Bowie be.
EXPORTING
I had so many issues with exporting my video. First of all, my laptop was being quite slow and the quality was really bad so I couldn’t see much of what I was doing in After Effects. For some reason, After Effects refused to play a preview of my film so I couldn’t see it as a whole before the export. Because of this I ended up exporting it about 12 times before actually finishing the video. And then I realised I had exported them all in AVI which are massive. I also exported my first (really finally) finished video as AVI and realised my mistake when it was trying to load to the google doc. The file was so massive I realised it would never go through so I deleted that one and tried exporting it as a QuickTime file. The first one didn’t work… There was only sound and no visuals…The same thing happened the second and then the third time. I then got the amazing advice from Laura that I should watch Will´s lecture about exporting. That was a very good idea. I tried his first method from the render queue, and followed his instructions exactly. But still it didn’t work. By this point it´s past midnight and I try the other method with the media encoder. It takes fifteen minutes to render but this time it finally worked. I was so relieved.
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