Project Research

In my post of Week 5 Studio B - 02, I mentioned that I will like to use the technique of 3D Spaces, Sparkle Particle Effect so I did some research about it. For 3D Spaces, here is one YouTube tutorial video I found. It is just a simple, brief tutorial for 3D Spaces but it gives me a basic understanding of how to create it in After Effect.

I think that 3D Spaces is very important in doing typography in After Effect because by using the technique, it gives the words a much "alive" feel as the words are able to turn, rotate, zoom in and out, not just being in a boring, stiff position throughout the video.

As for the Sparkle Effect, when I first Google about it, I chanced upon this website that contains a lot of Sparkle Effect clips! However, it requires purchase:(

But I managed to find a couples of YouTube tutorial videos about it! Here are one of the videos that is about how to do Sparkle Effect in After Effect.

In this video, the steps are short and clear, it shows a easy way to create a nice Sparkle Effect in After Effect!

To conclude, I will definitely be using this two techniques for my video but I still have to find more effects to use for my video.

Week 6 Gun Blowback

In this lesson, we are supposed to pick one of the tutorial video we want to do. The video I picked is the 01- Gun Blowback. As usual, we first import the materials given into After Effect then we drag the video named - blowback.mov to the timeline and duplicate it (command+d). At 0:00:00:05, shorten the blowback1.mov to one fram-erate and use the pen tool and pen out the top of the gun then move the drew out gun backwards. Add in blurriness to it by click on Effect->Blur->Directional Blur and adjust the direction and blur length to it so as to make it more real and realistic. The reason why we move the drew out gun behind is we wanted it to look like as if it was fired out.

Duplicate another video - blowback2.mov. In blowback.mov, at 0:00:00:08, shorten the video to 1 frame-rate again and move it forwards to 0:00:00:05. Adjust the opacity to around 13% and use the pen tool again and draw the gun part which it will go missing when the video plays.

Then turn back the opacity to 100% and you will see the part where you drew out is gone. The purpose of doing it is to further make it look like the gun is being draw back!

We mask feather it to 0.5 pixels to soften it. We also add the mask feather to the blowback1.mov and now we are at the last part of the exercise! Just add in the muzzleflashes into the stage and arrange accordingly and we are done! 

This exercise is simple and manageable. It further shows me that masking plays a important role in our video! As a lot of the exercises we done, we make use of masking.

Week 5 Studio B - 02

 For the post, we are to show our development of Project 1. For my Project 1, I had decided to do Typography for my video. I will be doing lyrics typography and the song I will be doing will be Rihanna - Diamonds. The reason why I picked this song, because the beats of the song is just right for doing Typography (to me), because it is not too slow which might bored to viewers and it is not too fast that the graphics will need to rush in to match the speed of the song.

The duration for our video is 30 seconds so I picked out this part of the song, it start from 1:24 to 1:54.

The lyrics are:

Shine bright like a diamond 

Shine bright like a diamond 

Shine bright like a diamond 

We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky 

Palms rise to the universe 

As we moonshine and molly 

Feel the warmth, we’ll never die 

We’re like diamonds in the sky 

You’re a shooting star 

I see A vision of ecstasy 

When you hold me, I’m alive 

We’re like diamonds in the sky

The reason why I picked this part is because it is the chorus and most of the people that heard this song before will know about the lyrics or at least know how to hum the song. Also, at some parts of the lyrics, some of the words can use graphics to represent or show it. For example words like, "Shine","Diamond","Sky","Palms","Shooting Star","Universe".

Here is one of the video I found in YouTube which is also the song I want to do but in lyric type, which is in typography! I really like this video! The way it represent some of the words and the way the present it is very interesting and catchy! It uses the technique like 3D Spaces, Sparkle Particle Effect, etc. So I will be doing more research on it soon!

The above two pictures are my storyboard. In my storyboard, I described what kind of images or effect to use for different scene! 

Week 5 Studio B - 01

In this exercise, we are supposed to do a video called Sky Replacement. It is quite similarly to Week 5 Studio A exercise videos, we have to change the background of the video but this time round, there is no green screen, it is just the footage of the video. 

In the original video, the sky is not clear so we decided to change the sky to a much more appealing one. To do that we use the effect called Colorama by clicking on Effect -> Colour -> Colorama and we adjust the whiteness and blackness of the footage from there.

Next, we use the tracking method and to achieve two track points in the footage. We also have to parent the image to the null object layer so that the image will move together with the footage,  to create a more realistic feel because if the sky just stay there it will appear to be fake! This point is very important as I think I will be able to use this technique for my Project 1!

Week 5 Studio A

In this lesson, we have to create 3 videos. The 3 videos names are 1) Basic keying and Transparency, 2) Colorkey (KeyLight), 3) Shooting. In this lesson, we will keep using the Keylight(1.2) effect. Keylight(1.2) is used for green or blue screen.

For the first video, Basic keying and Transparency - it make use of green screen to change the background to another image. We use the video of Tino Fall then we click on Effect-> Keying -> Keylight(1.2).  From there, we pick out the green screen color by using screen color at the side left panel and click on the green screen. Next, turn on the transparent switch so that the green screen will now be transparent looking.  As the green screen changed to the transparent screen, it is still not smooth so to make it smoother, we can just adjust the clip black, clip white and screen gain. Then, we mask the select image that we want by double clicking the pen tool and draw out the shape that will include the image you want. In this video, as there is a guy moving around so in different timeframe, we have to change the shape of the mask so that it can cover all the area we want to show. Remember to keyframe each of the mask path! Also, by selecting the selected areas we want to show, we also remove the unwanted background/areas. Now, we will just have to add in the explosion action and the background image - cloud by dragging the file below Tino Fall layer and we are done with this video! This video is quite simple and manageable! ^^

For the second video, Colorkey (KeyLight), it will be a further add on of our first video, everything is almost the same but just replacing the explosion to ink drip. Create a new solid layer by clicking on Layer-> New-> Solid and select black color. Create a another new solid layer by clicking on Layer-> New-> Solid and select green color. Place the black solid at the lowest and the green solid above the black solid and the Tino Fall above it. For the green solid layer set it to Alpha Matte so now the person will be green color and the background will be black color. Then, we add in the ink drip file and set the background image - Cloud to Luma Matte "ink drip" so that when we turn on the transparency, anything in white of the ink drip will shows through and anything in black will turn transparent. Finally it's done! This video is slightly harder than the first video, as we add in more techniques which is like a lot of techniques adding on together which is quite confusing! 

 

The last video, Shooting, it is also quite similar to the above two video, using the same techniques. We also use the pen tool and mask out the character. We just change the background to another image - Alley. At this point of time, we realised that it is not realistic. Mainly is because of the lighting of the shooter and the alley. Hence, we change the lighting of the shooter and the alley, to make it more realistic and believable. We also added an effect for the shooter so that when he shoots, the muzzle flashes which also aims to make the video look more realistic as it is suppose to look in this way in real life. 

Finally, we are done with the 3 videos. During the lesson, I found it hard to catch up as because the restrict of time, the teacher have to rush through all the 3 videos so when I got home, I watched the video links given in Olive and it helped me to understand this exercise better. During class, I was quite confused with all the various technique but when I am watching the video tutorial, I am able to work in my own speed and found out that actually this exercise is quite simple!

Week 4 Studio B

This video is the hardest exercise up to date. It's very tedious to do and I spent around 1 week plus to complete it. It requires a lot of different techniques to do this video. I will just explain some of the front parts I did for this video.

 First, we type out the words and fit it according to the audio. The timing is crucial for this part, as we want to make it look like as if when the audio, example "water" comes out, the word water will appear as well. So we have to match the words to the audio. 

After this, we changed our font to BlaxSlabXXL and change the font size. As originally, all the font size is the same but at some certain part of the video, the words are small while some others the words are large as different size of the font give off a different impression as well.

 For each word, it is in it own layer so for those words that are in the same page, we select them and click on Layer -> Pre-Compose to place them all in a single layer. For example, for the first part of the video the words are “Empty your mind” after we Pre-Compose all the 3 words in a single layer, if at the later point of the video, we need to edit one of the words, we can click on the Pre-compose layer and it will open up the individual layer which we did before we combine them into a single layer. 

Then, we carry on by importing the needed images to After Effect. As the images are not provided in Olive so we have to create our own ones. At first, I tried to Google similar images but it is not successfully as most images have the copyright trademark on it and also, I wanted to have the exactly same images as like the video. Hence, I decided to screenshot the different images of the video and edit it a Photoshop. In Photoshop, I removed the background by using the background easer tool and just save it as png format and import to After Effect. 

Next, we change the position of the words as some words enter in from left to right while some others enter by down to up. So to achieve that, we mask the selected words and change the position of the words as well. There are a lot more steps that I had done to complete this video and if I have to list the steps here, it will be a very long post so I will just stop here. 

To conclude, this exercise is extremely challenging and require a lot of time to complete it. So we have to take note of our time management so we will be able to complete it by the dateline. Even though, it is challenging, it taught me a lot of techniques in After Effect which will be beneficial for my MGE project!

Week 4 Studio A

This lesson is quite interesting as we are able to play with the different wording effects!

Some of the techniques we used in this lesson are opacity, blur, setting keyframe and masking. Compared to the exercises that we did before, this exercise is different by the wording effect and also the glowing light which make the text more interesting as if it is a opening for a movie!

Week 3 Studio A & B

In this week lesson, we learnt more techniques and skills in After Effect. As you had seen in the video above, it is made up of 5 different composition that we combined together an formed as a single video. We make use of mask technique and also take note of the postion so as to have the slide in and out effect. In this lesson, the most important thing I had learnt is that when I am doing after effect that contains audio, I have to take note of the timing. It is very important as when the content/image match the timing of the audio, it can create a different impact of the video.

Week 2 Studio B

In Week 2 Studio A, we learnt about adding text and dragging out items, for this lesson, we further on learn more playing around with the techniques in After Effect.

In this video, it shows the techniques of changing the brightness, opacity, blurriness, levels effect, etc.