Final Crit

I prepared a short run-through of how the project has developed and highlighted my intentions for the deadline, and took some useful pointers. I said that this project was just one of a series of learning phases for me as i look to try and build on the basic priniciples and think long term, which was well recieved. Also the tester animations reflected 'lot's of learning' on my part, so i was really happy with the feedback up to this point. NOTEZ-


Thinking ahead, i must consider some realistic research methods for a final outcome. I stated my intentions of producing a short ident for the ITV2 YCN comp, and i was reminded to use feedback to my advantage as i move through the design process, for target audience and age band especially.

Hopefully i can get this done and round off what for me has been a really enjoyable few months.

Fractal Noise

notes!-->

File Browsing

I've found that Bridge is a really useful tool for viewing effects and image sequences before importing them within your composition. 'ffx' files in AE allow Bridge to preview all sorts of presets for synthetics, text, transitions, audio, etc, and i believe it is the only software that can.


Previewing effects rapes my hard-drive to bits, so this method is much more efficient for my computer, and also saves time.

Starter workshop

I went in early doors today for an AE workshop with the technician Mike Flower. Although the things covered were very basic, i came out of it with some useful shortcuts and nesting techniques which will definitely speed up my work-flow. Now that i'm getting into more powerful techniques such as 3D space, his knowledge and feedback will be very useful for the future i'm sure.

Shattering

Sort've come to the first real hurdle so far - entering 3D space within my learning. I've been using arguably the two most powerful effects within AE; shatter and fractal noise, the latter i will look at more closely later.

Shattering in after effects allows you to animate the 'destruction' of a flat image with a massive, almost intimidating range of parameters at your disposal. It's not that i've come up stuck - (i understand the logistics of navigating with camera, lighting, even the physics parameters), but it's understanding the relationships between all these creative handles that make for the best finished results.

This was just a quick tester, it's pretty awful but it'll be interesting to see how i can improve my technique from this point.

HD in AE

One recent short I uploaded onto Vimeo was available in HD, others were not.. Had a quick look through the composition settings to try and find the set values for it - 1280 by 720. Here's the previous short tester of stylization effects in HD if you're interested;

Knoll Light Factory

This is another useful effects suite/plug-in I've looked into for animated graphics. It utilizes high-fidelity simulations of flared light effects, which simulate reflections from a very bright light source as seen through a camera's lens - all customizable. It also contains 'automatic tracking', a feature that tracks multiple points and adds multiple identical lighting points to a scene - similar to the match moving software seen in Druskq's work.

Puppeting

This is a pinning technique that can be used to create 'hinges' on still images, in the way that strings are attached to a puppet - thus the name. It creates quite an organic transition, and if used precisely would be a very suitable animation tool. I'd like to explore this further at some point.

Basic effects

I did some short tests, using effects to create animated content without any stock footage. They consist of distortions, (cornerpins, bulges, twirls, etc) and stylistic glows, light sweeps, and lens flares, although i barely scratched the surface. The basic animation principles were not considered, - this was just a way of experimenting with basic effects parameters.

Piccadilly Stone

Was having a chat about Bloom's stuff today, reminder of how good it is here.