I must say that I grow fonder and fonder of After Effects the more time I spend with it. Although that probably sounds like something someone wearing love googles raving about their new significant other would say, I've nevertheless felt more motivated to learn something or ask more questions. Even though my laptop is as slow as a dinosaur while After Effects is running, I was able to create a mock title sequence for one of the student thesis films I am working on entitled, "Mister Cupcakes". Check us out on our Flickr page.
The character design was done in multi-layers in Adobe Illustrator, exported as a .psd file, and then imported into After Effects. I added one camera, and the bouncing cherry squishes a little when it hits the ground before it bounces to dot the "i" in "Mister". And, don't forget to turn up the volume.
I have two mini projects this week because I wanted to try both - masking split screen and stenciling. The short popcorn piece is a mini-stop motion that I made with a motion text layer on the stencil luma mode, sound included.
The split screen piece of Fatima and I in our classroom was filmed by the handy dandy iSight camera in my Mac right after Ben taught us how to do masking. The two movies used had different lighting and made it difficult to match convincingly, so I desaturated both of the layers to smooth the divide even more. So far I am a big fan of the masking technique and aspire to do a more substantial project in the future (no that I am aware of lighting, framing, and placement issues), like this time freeze mask.
A hippie bus swoops into town for a midnight snack at the local Mickey D's when they think there's no one around. Before they can sneak inside, they are met by a squirmingly savage hamburger...
The granny and her tire (layer two) along with the wasteland background photo (layer three) are parented by the photo frame (layer one). This was done so that they could move together as the frame swung from side to side during the earthquake. I also created a motion path for the tire to roll to the side and then to the foreground while I scaled her and the tire to size. After all the scaling, rotation, and positioning was completed, I applied the "quaker" effect to all the layers for that earthquake visual. This was an effect that I downloaded offline and inserted into the Effects and Preset folder in After Effects.
All in all, I enjoyed navigating around After Effects for my first project even though I felt that the interface was a bit intimidating at first. After playing around with all the settings and controls through trial and error, I'm beginning to see how powerful this software can be.
Question: How can you apply an effect over a certain period of time with a start and end? I initially wanted to apply the "quaker" effect to all the layers from the beginning up until the frame fell. Is this where an adjustment layer comes in?
The finished product. A magical school bus on its way through a field of oversized dandelions in this cheesy, mystical scene. Mrs. Frizzle and the kids haven't been here just yet.
And here's the recipe and ingredients on how i did it!:
