Our next workshop involved becoming more advanced in After Effects, which I thought would be extremely helpful because this is a programme that I had never used prior to university. However, I LOVED this session. I felt like I experimented quite a bit with the tasks given and just overall I feel like I could definitely use After Effects for future projects other than just rendering and exporting image sequences!
The morning started off with a quick recap which I definitely needed, and then we opened up a pre made project composition and got started with the tasks. Our main goal was to make an animation of a boat in the sea, but also learn how to loop. Looping is when something is repeated so that you don't have to keep going back to the start to see it. It sounds easy enough, but you have to put a code into After Effects to actually make it work.
Once we had out waves looped, we added in a boat. We went through changing the boats composition so that the steam wouldn't be restricted to the small frame size, the steam would actually carry on into the distance. I then went in and made my boat move up and down so that it kind of went in time with the water, in order to make it look more natural
Since I felt like I was ahead I went and experimented with the programme further myself before the first half of the session ended. I duplicated my wave file so that there would be some more dimension to the sea and also change the colour of it so that it would appear more interesting, which I think I achieved. This is my outcome:
Once we had our boats and waves moving, we learnt how to mask. We made an adjustment layer and then changed it's form so that it would appear as a spotlight. I found this to also be a simple to do but hard to make it look nice. I have heard of masking in Photoshop, but I didn't know you could use it in this programme. This is my example of how I used it:
Then the second half of the session was learning about camera angles and lighting! This for me, was where the session got extremely complex. We made a new composition and simply added in a few solids of different colours. then we went ahead and added a camera to the composition. From this, we were able to change its position, angle, etc... and though I found this incredibly hard to get used to, I think over time it would be such a good tool to use!
The button shown above is what allows a later to be 3D. Without it, you cannot use the 3D space in After Effects. As far as the lighting bit of the session goes, it took me a really long time to perfect it. For one, adding lighting completely diminishes any colour that you could have possibly had in you composition, unless you get the right angle. And for me this took ages. I could only get one part of the screen to have colour, but after an hour or so, I got it to work. I also enabled the depth of field option, so that the composition would look even MORE 3D. This is my attempt at using After Effects' 3D space:
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