smafter effects

Removing two rigs from a 16 second animation was completely fine, but removing one teeny rig from a 2 second animation? Awful. So many teeny masks! 

I feel like I've learnt more about After Effects/Premiere/Photoshop more this week than the rest of the course. I was slightly rushed while animating the final performance, so I wanted to combined one of my tests which was only 9 frames with my final, and I somehow managed it easily! Also while animating this scene, I kept knocking the cake, even though it was stuck down it would still slightly move. So I gave up, and decided to edit it in afterwards. 

cake cake cake.

Backgrounds for this kinda slipped my mind, and my attempt of drawing something on photoshop failed miserably. I got this far and then just realised I was wasting my time. 

SO I asked my lovely friend/housemate Sydney Isaac if I could use her bakery environment as a background. I think they went quite well together. ^_^ 

I made a blackboard, and a little poster for my own attempts, so not to make it a complete waste of my time I decided to put them in. ^_^

For my rollercoaster animation, I filmed with the set floor and background green screened so I could easily edit the background video in, but that's the boring part. You might remember that in my sleepy state I named my website 'Laura on Toast'. Then while animating this animation, the word rollercoaster turned into rolla toaster! Toasterrrr! So I made a quick little logo for the rollercoaster stills.

I'm really really sleepy.

And that's it for After Effects folks!

So. Much. Rig. Removal.

I've spent the past two weeks animating, editing everything, while spending last week at work experience at the wonderful Trampires working on Chuck Steel, so yeah I'm totally cream crackered! 

I've spent so long on After Effect the last couple of weeks, I felt like I should at least one post about it. 

LOOK AT ALL THE MASKS!

Removing two rigs out of a 16 second animation. Ouch.

When the character falls off, I wanted the camera to shake. Honestly I couldn't explain how I did it, so yeah, here's a printscreen of it. All I can remember is that I had to type 'wiggle'. Proper coding like. 

After Effects Project

So below is the unedited and the final edited version of my animation for the After Effects project. :} Involved rig removal, green-screen, changing the brightness on every other frame, a few meltdowns, and the sparkles!

Unedited After Effects project from Laura Jones on Vimeo.

After Effects final from Laura Jones on Vimeo.

Oh, and since I seem to be dreadful at keeping my blog up to date, here's a link to my instagram below. Full of doodles, animation, gigs and my cat. :}

A photo posted by Laura Jones (@fantanazz) on Jul 7, 2014 at 2:08pm PDT

Wooah last post was in July? Oops. 

Ooookay, so I'm currently in the middle of pre-production on my final project in uni, scary stuff! But I'll save all that for another post, which will probably be posted a trillion years after the deadline.

The latest project was to animate and then use After Effects to make it all snazzy/get our heads around using the programme. I wanted to use an effect that you'd also have to use in live action so magic was the first thing to come to my mind. Magic = Fun. If there's a TV Show with a witch, there's no doubt that, that character will be my favourite, so it was decided! My armature was going to be a witch!

I already had the idea to animate the character casting a spell, I just needed to decided what kind of spell. My alternative option was to animate a witch on a broom, so I combined both ideas and came up with a sort of Fantasia themed animation, where a broom comes to life. 

Below are some quick thumbnails of ideas and key poses. ^_^

(Thumbnails/plan)

Keeping in mind I hadn't the foggiest idea how to use After Effects, I had to decide what effects I was going to use. Which was kinda stressful considering I unsuccessfully tried to create fire while listening to a tutorial by what sounded like a 8 year old boy.

But I got there in the end! Take that 8 year old boy! I can also make fire! IT'S CUBES! It's just blurred cubes! 

 

I wanted some sort of effect to come out of the wand to show the direction of the spell. In the end my aim was for that 90s sparkle effect, like in Sabrina the Teenage Witch/Buffy.

Below is my first test of the sparkles. Colour change and everything!