I'm a Geek

I went to Matt's studio earlier down at VTR North for a look at what he's doing with the wolf man piece; he's just finished cutting the 100+ frames out on Photoshop and has started to put them into after effects, it's actually looking really good!!! (I'll post a link on once it's all finished). He also went through a few things I wanted to know about how to go about doing, and anything he thought was useful for me.
Soooo.... I stayed in on my Friday evening and had a spectacular night in with Mr After Effects - and here's the results ...

Depth of field & camera....
It's not worked very well, I'm not sure if it's because the quality isn't very good, or if I've blurred too much, but I got the gist of it when I was playing around.. I like this :)


After Effects Experiments from Jodie Curley on Vimeo.

Lights and Shaddows
Matt said this was one of the best bits, when you start playing around with the lights... damn right!! look at those shaddows!!!! and they're only a few little squares with 2 spot light... this is definitely an important part of it all... It adds even more depth and reality to the 3D piece.. love love love it :)



Stop Motion Text
This is another thing I wanted to try out, it's straight forward stop motion, you just have to think about the timing of things and how fast you want your text to flow, or how jumpy you want it to appear..
This works really well till the last half a second or so.. i couldn't keep the same frame on there as it just brought a sudden end to the sequence, I needed the jumpy images to continue and I was struggling to achieve it.. here's a first attempt by one layer and changing the position.


Yeah, the last bit just looks odd, so I tried again, this time by just repeating the layer, but slightly altering the rotation/position per layer - a jumpier, rather than smoother transition I think.. this works better :)



For both of the above I also used an adjustment layer to brighten the images and alter the contrast a little so that you couldn't see so much of the lines in the background.. next I can try drawing onto green card to see if i can take off the background completely and layer it into an animation as speech or something like that?
Just thought mumbling now.. :)