In the second class of our introduction to After Effects, I feel like we learnt A LOT. It's not that the programme is particularly complex, only really if you make it that way, but there is just a lot that you can do with it, and it was a little overwhelming. I would say the aspects we covered mostly were, formatting and preparing assets.
To begin with, we looked at easing in and easing out, a principle I am familiar with after the pendulum task we did for our last module. That took me a few hours to grasp, but in this induction, it literally took me two seconds to achieve on this programme. It is so simple, because there are such simple options for 'Easy ease', 'Ease In' and 'Ease out', and the programme will do it for you. There is also a graph button which you can toggle so that you can see the properties of that ease in/ease out, and then go in yourself and alter the speed to your desire.
Then we went on to preparing assets in Photoshop/Illustrator to use in After Effects. We learnt you can save files as .Jpeg, .tiff, and .png (which is especially good for transparent backgrounds) in order for them to work. Once you have saved them you can import them in to After Effects and then drag them on to the timeline, and they will work as well as the solids we had been experimenting with before. Whilst we had a quick break, I had a play around with these layers and made a quick video of them, just for further practice.
After that, we were given more images, however with texture and dimension and were told to have a go at animating them. The images we were given were a lot brighter and flat, so once I had set the composition that I wanted I went in and adjusted the levels and the hue/saturation of the sky and the mountain. Since I liked the idea of making them look darker, I ended up conveniently finding the option for rain, and added that to the background of my animation, just to emphasise the dark setting. You could adjust the speed of the droplets and the direction they were going in and I thought this was very useful and could come in handy for the future. I also made the balloon less opaque, so that it would look more realistic and blend in a bit with the sky so it looks further away. Then I started animating. I find my priority lies with the aesthetic of the product before i animate it, because it is what the audience sees first and judges; by its appearance.
We also learnt about keyframe interpolation, which if you use the 'convert vertex tool' and click on each keyframe, it will change the curve to a straight line which will be useful if you want a more sporadic type of movement.
From this induction, I feel like I have actually considered using aspects of this programme in 'The Classical Elements' brief. Especially when it comes to my setting. I am focusing solely at animating my characters primarily, but I think once I start animating my background, this programme could perhaps be the perfect choice. Either way, so far After Effects is not for just editing clips, you can actually animate with it, which when I was working on the pixilation brief, I had no idea about.
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