Week 4, Masking

In this weeks exercise i found it very worthwhile, having never learnt about masking in after effects i was very excited to have the chance to use the new masking tool.

The area i chose to do an identity for was the beach, i love going to the beach and i thought it would hold a lot of different options for animating. I wanted to diliver the message that the beach is for everyone, and that mostly everyone enjoys the beach and has fond memories there. That is why i came up with the catch line," The Beach, The life!" This was ment to relate to the saying "This is the life", emplying that by going to the beach and enjoying yourself, was the life.

In my animation i used pictures of differnt people at the beach, an olderman, a woman holding a surf board, a middle aged man and a little boy finally at the end. I used people for different domographics to relay the message that the beach is for everyone. If i was to do this exercise again i would probably getting better pictures of the people, and a better picture of the beach, possibly a photo of the beaches horizen on the water, rather than on an angle.

I made the background picture of the beach black and white, because i like this effect and i feel it brings a lot of emphasis to the other pisctures of the people which are in colour.

The animation i put together was rather simple, and i felt it was a little boring, although it used all the masking techniques that i had been taught, i still felt it was missing something. Over all how ever i found this exercise very usefull, and great practice in using the usefull masking tool which will be very usefull for my animation assignment.

Week 2, Flying Posters

In this Tutorial exercise i was learning the roles of the key frames with in After Effects. Being that i am a little, and i do mean a little experienced with the After Effects program, i found the whole exercise well worth the time because it refreshed my memory of the program.

In this exercise i basically made the poster's fly around in the sky, but i also made them inter act with one another, for example having them crash into each other and then act accordingly, attempting to replicate what would happen in real life.

I worked with the poster's rotation key frames as well as there position, scale and anchor point key frames. By tinkering with all these aspects off the poster, i was able to make them look as if they were actually flying around and reacting off one another.

In conclusion, even though this finished project may have been a little boring and nothing amazing, i still found this exercise very re warding, and a good exercise in learning about the role of key frames with in After Effects.

Photoshop Tutorial Exercise

While doing this tutorial exercise a learned how important the positioning of objects is when making a spacial montage. I replicated the life size doll in a jacket to make it look as if they were marching on the roofs and elevators. To be honest, there was no real meaning behind this peace of work, i was just getting myself familiar with some of the tools photo shop has to offer in editing image layers. I became familiar with tools such as as the free transform tool, the stamp tool, and the magic wand tool which enabled me to replicate the life size dolls and position them in a way to make it look like they were marching in line.

I also applied a layer effect called linear lighting to the top layer, which gave the image a creative see through effect, and made the whole image more interesting to look at.

Over all this exercise taught me a lot in positioning layers effectively, and also taught me that space unoccupied by an object is just as important as the space that is occupied.