Motion Graphics / Visual Effects – Week Five/Six

During the two workshops we began to use After Effects again, I was particularly looking forward to these workshops as it’s something that really interests me personally. We were given some stock images, one of a toy robot and one of the city of Lincoln, with these we were tasked to animate the robot to stomp through the city with all of it’s limbs being animated. We began by cutting out each of the toy robot’s limbs in Photoshop and then filling in the gaps that were left by using the clone stamp tool to remake sections of the robot that did not exist beforehand. After the sections of the robot had been cut out, we imported the file into Adobe After Effects and parented each of the different limbs on their own layers and then parented the layers together so that they would all work in accordance to each other when we moved and animated them. We used various different tools to animate the robot such as using key-frames to change the different positions of the limbs throughout the timeline, we moved the arms using the Z Axis after converting them to a 3D object so it would simulate them swinging in 3D space.

In the second week of working on visual effects we recreated a similar effect to the one in the short introduction to ‘Amazing Spaces’ in which a caravan would construct itself out of the flat net of the shape. we did this by creating a net of one of our initials, mine being a J. In Adobe Illustrator I created various rectangles and cubes which would be able to be built up in After Effects to create a 3D shape. In this exercise we used the same method of parenting the layers together once in AE to be able to rotate and position the different sections of the letter throughout the timeline to create the 3D shape. One of the new skills we learnt in this exercise was how to do camera tracking and how to make the shape stay in one position within some live footage. This was originally doable via a user created plugin which was then eventually integrated into the After Effects program as standard by Adobe.