After effects: learning and testing

Colour palette

 We had a couple of very helpful lessons on after effects. I was very surprised with the amount of things you could do with it. He showed us how to make basic animations, how to use simulations, make 3D spaces with a virtual camera and how to make any object react to music. It has been very interesting to me and I´ve gotten over my initial hate/ fear of after effects. Now I find myself excited to learn more. Unfortunately most of the time I only have my laptop to use it on and it often crashes when I try too many things at the same time. The first short brief I tried to make wasn't saved as my laptop crashed each time I tried it. It wasn´t great though because at that point I still struggled with the basics of after effects. Since then I´ve been to university once where we played around mainly with simulations and I realised it wasn´t actually as hard as it seems. That was also where I began to be excited by it as I could freely take a look at all the available effects and simulations without it lagging. I was amazed by it. After that I tried again to experiment on my laptop but it crashed that time too so I have nothing to show for it. Eventually though I managed to make a sequence with music and I am very happy that I managed to do all that. 

Firstly I managed to make an object move to a random piece of copy right free music I chose. I watched a couple of youtube videos as revision and saw how I could manipulate the changes it makes. I even did a tiny bit of kind of coding which I´m very proud of. I normally don´t like that kind of stuff. Here is photo evidence:

It was to help make the movement smoother and to control the size of object. To begin with the oval went from really small to giant all the time so I wanted it to be less dramatic.

Then I went crazy with all the effects I could, mainly from the distort section. I tried out so many just to get an idea of all that was available. I tried things like camera blur, buldge, liquify, mirror, smudge etc.

The end result:

I have now chosen a piece of copyright free music I want to use for the final video. Otherwise I´m not sure yet of what I want to do.

I had a quick check up with Will and he just suggested I should plan the video before going to After Effects which is probably a very good idea.

I thought I could divide the music into three different parts to have a beginning, middle and end.