Assignment 1 - After Effects Techniques

For the assignment I utilised several techniques to achieve the look and feel of using a digital SLR Camera.

I used a 3D camera to position and move around the scene. The camera had depth of field turned on, with blurring set to 97% and a higher apperture. This was particularly important for the second animation where the camera zooms and pans through the buildings as it gives the buildings depth and layering as there is a progressive lens blur which is effected by the positioning of each building in the Z-space. A wiggle motion was also applied in some areas to give the impression that the camera was being held by a human hand, this was most noticeable in the first scene. The problems associated with using this effect at such a high setting was that rendering the video took close approximately 40 minutes, also the render was error prone due to After Effects requesting up to 1gb of ram for the render. Although my computer system has 4gbs of ram, the program was peaking and may not have been able to use more than an allocated amount, thus causing the program to crash numerous times. The solution for this was to close unnecessary programs and to delete unnecessary elements in the composition, this allowed for a problem free render. Other minor problems included setting the values for the depth of field and also positioning shots to make them look effective within the context of the assignment.

The first animation used a particle effect which was set to a low opacity. The particles were set to low gravity with a 2-3 second life time. This was used to help achieve the effect of dust and noise within the lens of the camera. It was used to create a distorted and dirty view in the viewfinder.

The view finder was created in illustrator using a canon 450D viewfinder to position elements such as rectangles and circles.The viewfinder was imported into After effects as a vector and was overload on many of the shots. The viewfinder has a related shutter closing and opening effect which is used to transition between Scenes. This transition was created using two black shakes which moved towards the centre of the screen. I found it difficult to animate moving objects within After Effects as the interface was completely different to using a program such as Adobe Flash, which uses tweens and motion paths to animate objects between keyframes. The short term solution was to use linear horizontal/vertical/diagonal motions until I can succesfully make the transition to After Effects.

Shadows and lighting was also created within after effects. The light tool was used to create a point light onto 3d objects within the animation, it was also used to cast shadows of the buildings. One of the main issues with this was that it caused After Effects to slow down during ram preview. The short-term solution was to decrease the resolution to either a half or a third however this mostly made the video unwatchable.

I also used text preset animations such as the type writer effect. I also found this to be difficult to use in AE as i felt limited by the types of preset animations as well as my lack of knowledge in creating the dynamic look and feel that envisioned in my story boarding. The solution was to use simple presets such as the type writer effect as it was a subtle effect that relatively matched the style of the animation.