Assignment #8: Motion Tracking/Stabilizing on a Tomay-toe Farm

Motion Tracking is super useful.  It took me a couple tries to track the unstabilized footage well.  I tracked the big, red bucket full of tomatoes, and it began tracking the man's red hat next to it instead a few seconds in.  The tracker also freaked out a bit when the man passed by the car window, and began tracking the window instead when the bucket and window crossed paths.  However, through trial and error, I changed the feature point and tweaked the options settings (RBG, Adapt Every Feature, Enhance, Adjust X and Y, etc.) a bit and finally got something to work with!

The unstabilized footage - walking while filming, rocky, hand held camera on a Tomato farm:

Unstabilized Footage - Tomay-toe Farm from Candace Lau on Vimeo.

The stabilized footage- stabilized, smoother, color corrected. It is pretty smooth in the first couple of seconds, hiccups a little bit towards the end:

Stabilized Footage - Tomay-toe Farm from Candace Lau on Vimeo.

Assignment #7: Particles. And Jellyfish.

This particle assignment was created from a Jellyfish photo I shot this break from the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.  I took it into Photoshop for some color correction, brought it into After Effects, added a custom Distortion Effect to wiggle the Jellyfish, and added a wave-like feature.  There is also a camera zoom in addition to some water/bubble audio.

As for the particles, I added the snow particles on a solid layer to mimic sea plankton or sea sediment.  I turned down the scale, speed and number of particles, and set an opacity because they looked rather artificial.  I did the same with the bubbles, and tweaked the settings for this underwater effect.   

Jellyfish from Candace Lau on Vimeo.

Assignment #6: Text. And Crabs.

     I text animated the first scene from my new piece, "Murphy The Crab" in After Effects. It is a story about an algae-afroed, adolescent crab named Murphy who can't walk from side to side like every other crab. The fact that he can walk forwards and backwards may possibly save the entire day...or just himself.

The first video is the opening scene done with TEXT in After Effects:

Murphy Text Teaser from Candace Lau on Vimeo.

The second video is the final product in Flash:

Murphy The Crab from Candace Lau on Vimeo.

Feedback for improvement is more that welcome.