Final Project week 4

The final week!
I'll be out of town Tuesday and Wednesday so I'm uploading and posting today.

The video is finished and I'm pretty happy with it. I spent longer than I had hoped on it, not because of setbacks, but rather I wasn't happy with what I made. I spent whole evenings working on the credit sequence (its only a couple seconds long) only to look at what I made and not like it. I must have gone through eight different ending sequences in After Effects before I settled on the one in the video. I started with one that was basic text, but I thought it was too boring and scrapped it. Tried doing a digital-ish background with text, and thought it looked too cheesy. Then I spent some time making my own background in Photoshop, which took me a few hours to tweak.



I imported the PSD into After Effects and worked in 3D to get the floating effect I wanted with the camera pan. I must have changed what I wanted the camera to do and which way I wanted things to move, etc, etc a gajillion times. It ended up being simple, yet elegant and that's what I was shooting for. I also tried a few intros in After Effects, but as I expected, I liked my original enough that I used it as my signature intro.



The editing also took a long time to assemble the footage and find the good shots. Once again it brought back a lot of memories of my drifting days. Most of those people are no longer driving and the cars have been sold/wrecked, and the same goes for myself. I enjoyed the project as a whole and the video, while being nothing spectacular, will be around for me to remember in the future. I look forward to working on my After Effects skills after I graduate in a few months, I tend to enjoy editing/creating more when I'm not worrying about making the grade. Great class!

Final Project Week 3

I'm a little late on this, but it doesn't mean I haven't made progress! End of semester classes have been kicking my butt so my blog posting got shoved to the side.

So anyway, progress is going well. The footage is assembled and the music chosen. Only thing that is really left is to finish up the AE text for the credits/end.

Here is a screenshot:

Final project week 2 report

Still getting everything together and figuring out what I want to use for the text portions, I really like using 3D with text. My only worry is that I run out of new ideas for the different styles. As I have said, I have a hard time coming up with unique creations in After Effects off the top of my head.

Final Project - Intro

For my final project I'm planning on integrating some of my extreme sport footage of drifting with two After Effects features: 3D and text manipulation. My original intent for taking this class was to learn how to use After Effects to make my videos better and that's what I plan on doing.

I have very little interest in creating feature/fiction film. My RTF career at UT has been in perusing editing and documentary. Honestly, I think I suck at creating stories from my head, I prefer to film the real world as it happens and use my creativity to assemble it into an entertaining video or documentary. It seems any time I try to create something from an idea, a video or action of some sort, it just comes out lame. So, that is why I've decided to use my strengths in After Effects to support something I know and enjoy doing.



For the actual project I am planning on using drift footage gathered over the years and including text intros and credits to 'spruce up' the documentary footage. Of course there will be setbacks and things that I will want to change, but my style is usually loosely planned or off the cuff, so I hardly ever can plan out what the final project will be when its finished. That's the beauty of my work so far :)



Basic schedule
Week 1 - organize
Week 2 - Go through my stockpiled footage for the good/interesting shots, edit
Week 3 - Music and edit, work on the intro AE sequence and any other text.
Week 4 - Tidy up the loose ends in the video edit and the AE titles, render

Particles

I choose to create a fire with particle on a photo of a squirrel smoking a cigarette. I have five particle effects using faded spheres and stars for the embers, the main fire effect, two flares of different other fire colors, slight smoke, and some faint embers set to twist.

Project #7 Motion Tracking

I thought motion tracking was going to be harder, but turned out (after 3 different tries) I found some footage that worked with a good motion track. I first had to experiment with different clips, I stopped using ones that had little contrast or were too jumpy. Once I put the bears in the clip I made each of them rotate for S&G's. Nothing too elaborate or fancy, but I laugh at it each time I see it since it doesn't make any sense!

Project #6 - Text

Fiddled around with some of the text similar to the presets and didn't like that style. Decided to employ some more 3D cameras and liked that much more. This video was the best of my attempts. Simple text with some embellishments.