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What is After Effects?
Adobe After Effects is a digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing application developed by Adobe Systems and used in the post-production process of filmmaking, video games, and television production. Among other things, After Effects can be used for keying, tracking, compositing and animation.
Why do we use After Effects?
Many artists and post production professionals rely on After Effects to generatie visually Stunning work for film, TV, video and web. After Effects brings "life" and motion to graphics, where it's as simple as animating a title across the screen or as complex and building a 3D word, After Effects can do it all.
Inspiration
As after effects video are usually longer there weren't many example video on pinterest so I used it more as inspiration for my own designs. I also used the videos we watched in class as inspiration. I knew when starting this project I wanted to do a song and I wanted that song to tell a story, so I started looking through my playlists to find songs, until I found one I thought would work good. I chose the song Wonders by the Script because it talks about traveling and seeing all the wonders of the world. So I thought the animations for this would be very cool, to have a person walking, phone dialing and all the other things talked about in this song.
Early Attempts
This is one of the first things we did in after effects in class. Using this picture we had learned how to use keyframes, anchor points, importing illustrator files, motion blur, rotate, opacity and many other features in after effects. This picture to the left however is just a screenshot of the image we were using because I sadly cannot find my edit version of this. Amidst creating my final project my desktop is currently a mess, as it is filled with many files from that and I cannot find some of the work I did earlier. But besides that I was still able to remember what we learned when creating this and use those skills into my final project.
Planning
Before starting my final project I created a storyboard of my designs and what I wanted to include for each lyric of the song. At the images to the right you can see the plans for each image the lyrics that coincide below it.
After creating these storyboard we uploaded images of each slide and animated it in after effects to get the timing correct for our final. Linked below is the animated version of the storyboard
Starting My Final Project
When starting my final project I was also learning how to use a new software. I knew that taking on this new software would be a bit of struggle as learning something new is difficult, especially in such a short period of time, but I love hand drawing things so I knew this would have a good outcome. For most of my drawing on this final I used procreate to draw them. I had recently gotten and Ipad and I wanted to use this to hand draw my illustrators as I feel I am much better and drawing by hand than drawing on my computer. However hand drawing everything was very time consuming yet, worth it because i think the results turned out pretty well.
To the right, at the top is the first walk cycle I drew. This one was just a tester to see how it would work and I knew it was not going to be the one I used for my final project. It was just used to gain knowledge on how to successful draw a walk cycle. So when going to create my final one I knew I wanted to get rid of the harsh black outline which did not go with the rest of my drawings. I also wanted to make the person look a little more realistic, and although I chose not to add a face I did giver her more of a shape such as you can see her chin and her nose, where as in the first draft it was just a round head. I also think that this can be updated and in the future I would like to redo this person and give her a facial with facial expressions to make it more realistic, but none the less the second version is much better than the first.
Starting My Final Project
Drawing all these animations was one of my favorite parts of this projects. I like the control I have when drawing everything by hand because anything I do not like I can change very easily. I have grown up taking art classes and drawing so getting to draw her yet it be something online that can be animated was very cool.
To the right here I show some of the images that I drew, however what you cannot see is under each images there are around 20/30 different versions of relatively the same thing with slight changes to make them animated.
Below are some of my drawings animated on their own before I imported them into after effects to be apart of the whole video.
Importing
Once its Imported
Selecting Files
How the Files Look Edited
Importing into After Effects
To import into effects you want to go file, import, multiple files and then scroll through the files on your device and select all. When importing these videos it is important to make sure you check the create composition button
Once the files are imported, there are so many option you can do with after effects to create different effects. There are ways to animated text images, pretty much anything you can think of is possible
I also included this last picture to show that each separate composition will make its own line in after effects, and can be edited on its own. This can get very hectic with there being so many files so it is important to keep them organized so your movie will flow smoothly.
Exporting the Video
Once you have completed your video in after effects you have to export it and put it into Media Encoder. If you do not do this you will not be able to view the video as you cannot play and after effects file on its own. Once you import this video you want to change it to whatever format you chose to upload it to after. For mine I chose do mine as one that is compatible with youtube so it exported as an mp4 file. There are also options to export as Vimeo file, but I have been uploading my other work to my YouTube channel so I did the same with this video.
Most Recent After Effects Project
This is my most recent after effects project put all together. After many long hours of work I think it turned out pretty well for my first larger project on after effects. However this project is far from done, there are still many more things I would like to add/ change but was not able to do due to the time constraints of the semester. But I will be editing and working more on this over the break, as I enjoyed creating this project very much, and will try some other projects as well. Here is the link to the full video on my youtube channel.
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