Week 7 '3D Composition'

This weeks Tutorial was more difficult than i originally thought. It also had a lot more steps in the proccess than i thought.

Firstly i found 2 photo's and took them into Photoshop. I cut out certain objects in the photo of the farm and turned them into their own layer, this way i could animate them separately. So for example i used the lasoo tool to cut out the barn, then cut out the wheat and the hills in the background etc. I found this quite time consuming, and if i was going to do this exercise again, i would choose simpler pictures.

After separating the objects in the picture, i used the clone tool to extend the images, to fill in some of the transparency which resulted in cutting out objects in the picture.

Once i was finished I then loaded the photo shop file into After Effects as a composition, this way i could animate the individual layers how i wanted, and change there position individually.

I changed each layers z positioning to give the illusion of depth in the composition.

I then followed the techniques from the 3D Composition video that Chris had a up loaded on Blackboard and imported a camera into the composition to create the 3D effect.

After key framing the camera's movement and position, i masked out the plane from my second picture and added it to the main composition and gave it the illusion of flying infront of the mountains.

The things i like about my composition is the constant movement off the camera, i like how it's taking the viewer through the composition and makes the viewer feel part of the composition instead of an outside looking in.

The things i dont like about the final composition are as follows.

1. Im not satisfied with the quality of cloning i did in photoshop, im not very familiar with photoshop, and i feel that my cloning was average, if i was going to do this exercise again i would look up on the internet cloning techniques in photoshop to make it look more realistic.

2. I think that i may have rotated the camera a little bit too much when focusing on the plan at the end, the angles are so tight that it make the composition look much more un-realistic. If i was going to do this again, i would do more cloning and make the background image larger so that it would be easier to rotate the camera's point of view, and i would also have the camera further back from the subject to make it even more realistic.

In Conclusion i learned a lot about 3D compositioning in After Effects, but i also learned a lot about the photoshop program, and am excited to now know a few techniques which i will be able to use in my final assignment.