Creatures Music Video – Pattern Smile

I finally finished the music video with my lil creatures in! The song is a creature version of Pattern Smile that me and Yut recorded ages ago. I’m glad I made this in the end because it helped me get a bit more used to After Effects and also now I know a lil bit about how to use Logic!

Post Production Project – 2D Animation Scene

I’ve finished creating the 2D animation scenes that appear at the start and end of my film, here are screenshots of them:

I will not show the actual animation because I want it to be a surprise when they are shown together at the end.

I originally started with the image above but I decided that the inverted one worked better:

Viral Video Project – Finished

Woo! It’s finished!

Viral Video Project – Editing

We began editing by numbering the images and placing them together in a sequence on After Effects. We also resized the images before doing this as they were huge (3000ish pixels by 2000ish pixels), which would have made the hard to edit/render in After Effects. Below are some videos showing how images look when placed together in a sequence:

Night Out Project – The Final Thing!

The final thing:

There are six main sections of my video. The first highlights the synchronization between the tachikoma and the music, which reflects how my movements are in reality. The coloured lighting is also brought in during the first section because I feel that it is one of the most important aspects of a night out. Also, the first section is one of the longest, so I feel the change of lighting is appropriate as it creates variety within the section.

The second section is about how lighting distorts the body, as I used different layer masks to invert his body in different places.

The third section is to do with how space is essential for me/tachi to completely let ourselves go, which is why I presented him in a completely white, empty space.

The fourth section is where he starts to go crazy like I do; his body breaks apart to the beat of the music and this symbolizes the feeling of wanting to break free from my body as I dance. The craziness continues in section five, where tachi has another self which dances together with him and this reflects how when I dance crazily, sometimes it feels like I’m dancing enough to make up for two people.

The last section shows the tachikoma powering down at the end of the night. I chose to zoom in and out and blur some parts because this reflects how at the end of vigorously dancing when I try to stand still, I can’t quite do it and the room blurs, then sometimes I feel a bit sick, which is suggested by the yellow lighting used in this section, as yellow is often associated with sickness.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with this, though as an animation, I feel that some parts of this are a bit bland as there is only one subject throughout the whole thing, so I will definitely try and include more characters/scenery in future animations.

Night Out Project – More Experiments

I have been continuing with the making of my tachikoma video, and here are some compositions I tried out but decided not to use in the end:

I did sort of use this one in the end, though I changed the colour of the lighting to yellow, as I felt the white didn’t look very good. Also, I thought yellow was quite an appropriate colour to choose, as it’s often associated with sickness/ill health, which works well with this section as this part is supposed to represent the end of a night out where illness starts to creep in.

I used the first half of this one, but changed the second half a bit. I thought the effect created by the second half looked quite cool, but it didn’t really work well with the appearance of the tachikoma. I felt it made it look a bit too much like wallpaper.

Viral Video Project – Costume and Tunnel and Levitation

After sorting out the heads (which took quite a while because we had to put sponges in them to stop them from smashing when we jumped), we went to the tunnel to take some levitating photos because the outfits were complete. Our original clothes were gonna be just a black jumper and black trousers/shorts, but it’s very cold at the moment, so we decided to shoot this sequence with our coats on and after looking the photos, we decided that it actually looked quite good with the coats, so we will be keeping our coats on in the actual video.

Here we are, levitating. It was quite hard to do this, as we had to continuously follow the sequence of jumping, then taking a step forward. However, we were pretty much blind as the heads have no eye holes so it was quite amusing as we kept walking diagonally and sometimes jumped at different times.

Here is one where we failed to jump, though I still think it’s a really nice photo and it highlights our costumes well.

And here is the film crew!

Below are a few different videos that Kavi made using these photos:

She tried out different effects to help us determine which ones we’ll use in the final thing. I quite like the fourth one, though I think it would be better if the bottle looked more like it was part of the scene rather than just floating on top like a different layer.

Night Out Project – Development

To transform my still image into an animated video, I started by photoshopping the tachikoma into my own style by using the pen tool. I drew around the parts of the tachikoma that I thought were necessary and left out parts such as the big chunky part on its back. This is because I felt those parts didn’t really having any purpose/meaning in the imagery.

This is the first image I created:

It’s a line drawing of the tachikoma, which I thought looked quite effective because it has a lot of detail across its body. However, this would be hard to animate, as when the body parts move, the lines will break and it will look like its falling apart. So, I tried another style:

This one would be easier to animate, as the lines aren’t so bold, so when the body parts are moving, it won’t look so much like they’re breaking. However, the lines are a bit too smooth and faint, which creates quite a peaceful effect, so I can’t really use this style because that’s the opposite of the effect I want to create. I want my subject to look energetic and bold. Thus, I created one more design:

This one works the best I think, because not only is it easier to animate compared to the other two (due to the block colour), but it also creates the right effect aesthetically. I presented the colour of the body in such a way because it represents how the lighting during a night out can distort the image of our bodies. I also feel it captures the viewers attention a lot more than if I were to have coloured it normally.

The next step I took was to break up this image into the different body parts that would move separately:

Arms

Body

Front Legs

Back Legs

I needed to do this in order to animate the different body parts separately.

So, I had a go at animating it:

I just moved it’s body parts randomly in this experiment because there was no music to synchronize it to. However, this made me realise that the gaps of time between the keyframes of movement were too big, for it looked like its leg were bouncying up and down as if it were walking on the moon, which isn’t the kinda of effect I wanted to create. I want its movements to look a lot more rigid/robotic and I think this can be achieved by lessening the times between the keyframes. Also I think I move the subject a bit further from the camera, as at the moment I think it appears too big, making it hard for the viewers to take in its movements.

I’m now going to see how it looks in 3D (whilst still using After Effects), as currently in 2D, it seems to look a bit flat and I’m not sure that keeping the imagery flat throughout the video will be enough to keep viewers entertained.

Here is the first 3D experiment:

This wasn’t so successful, as for some reason it just didn’t look that 3D. The front and back legs kept merging into one, which looked pretty strange. The only things that looked kind of 3D were the arms, so overall, this experiment just looks like the 2D version except at an angle, which isn’t what I wanted to achieve. So, I tried angling its body parts a bit differently, so that they were reaching forward or pointing backwards, as I thought this might help it look a bit more 3D:

This did make it look a bit more three dimensional, but it also made it look sort of like it was falling apart. So actually, the first one looked a bit better, which made me wonder what I could do to make it look more 3D. That’s when I had another look at my 3D After Effects fish animation that I made the other day and realised that the problem with this animation was the use of only two colours. So, I tried adding another colour to it:

I felt this one looked more 3D that the other two, which made me decide that I will use 3D mostly during the parts when colour comes in. The red circle separates the different layers a lot more clearly, so I will make shapes like these float between the different layers to make them look more 3D. So, I tried adding more shapes to it and I moved them through and between the layers to see if this would make it look even more 3D.

I think the increase in the number of shapes definitely adds to the sense of 3D-ness. However, I think the shape would look better just moving between the layers rather than through them because when the shapes move through them, it seems like they appear and disappear too suddenly, whereas when the shapes move between the layers, it just emphasizes the depth of the layers, which is effective for showing the 3D-ness.

I then thought of another way I could make the subject appear 3D:

The main idea behind this experiment is to see how it looks if I rotate it’s body through the 3D planes. I think it would look quite effective if I rotated many body parts on one of the axis’, but at the moment, I think the movement is too much, making it look too random, as it’s rotating on all three axis’.

After Effects 2

A very useful thing we learnt today in After Effects was how animate in 3D. This gave me an idea of another effect I could add to my night out video. I felt it looked very effective when the camera moves to reveal the 3D-ness of the imagery. It creates an effect a bit like the Magic Eye pictures, which I love. Here is the video I created (unfortunately it was done using stock images because I didn’t have an idea, so I didn’t know what to photograph):

Another useful technique I learnt was to animate in After Effects without using key frames. This creates sort of bee/fly like effect, which may be useful in future, though I probably won’t use it in my night out video.

After Effects

The videos below were the first ones I’ve made using After Effects. After Effects seems to be a very useful programme and I really enjoy learning how to use it. I am very interested in making motion graphics and After Effects seems to be the programme to use to create what I want. I also think that I’ll definitely use it to create the moving image in our Night Out project, as, not only is it easy to use, but there’s a lot one can do with it.

The first video shows me experimenting with the simplest tools. In this clip I used movement, rotation, scaling and changes in opacity. I also learnt how to create standard objects, such as squares, so this first experimentation was very useful in allowing me to get to grips with the programme.

This second video is very similar to the first, however, it allowed me to learn a different way of creating rectangles as well as let me experiment with enlarging an object so much that it didn’t fit in the window. It also taught me how to adjust the colours of objects.

This third video mainly allowed me to experiment with layer masking. Which allowed the text to be visible as it intersected the other rectangle.

This fourth video used layer masking in a more complex way. It allowed me to create multiple layer masks and move them across a static image. For my Night Out project, I was think of using a robot as my main subject (this will be explained in a later post) and so I decided to use an image of a robot fish for this video. However, the fish in didn’t seem to work too well with the layer masking, so I created a couple more videos like this to experiment further with the multiple layer masking.

Here is a video very similar to the one above except instead of a fish, I used an image of some scenery, as I felt this worked better with the multiple layer masks. Also, I decided to make one of the layer masks move horizontally instead of vertically, which I felt made the video look a lot more interesting. However, I still felt the video was missing something, so I created one last video to add the finishing touches.

This is the last video with the use of multiple layer masking. The final touch I added was that I changed to the opacity of the layer masks as they moved across the screen. I felt this made it look professional and slick.

This video was made using a preset objects, which formed a shadow puppet. It allowed me to learn that joints could be created between objects, which was incredibly useful as it allowed me to establish that I could make animals/humans move/dance using After Effects, which then lead to my idea of making the robot dance in my Night Out project.