After Effects
Adobe After Effects
Adobe After Effects is a digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing application developed by Adobe Systems and used in the post-production process of filmmaking and television production. Among other things, After Effects can be used for keying, tracking, rotoscoping, compositing and animation. It also functions as a very basic non-linear editor, audio editor and media transcoder.
As a program After Effects is very similar to Photoshop, a program I am already very familiar with. It even works natively with Photoshop files with all the layer information intact, therefore we began with a Photoshop file containing the image shown in the main window above, with the various elements split by layer. Next we took one of the balloons from the image (shown selected above) and used the keyframe system to control it's movement. The stages to this are:
- record the initial position of the balloon by inserting a keyframe in the position line at the beginning of the timeline (the small blue diamond in the position line of the timeline near the bottom of the screen.
- Move the timeline to the end of the animation.
- Move the balloon to the desired end position.
- Insert a second keyframe.
The next step was to animate one of the spotlights shown selected above. We alternated its position using the same technique as before, but increased the frequency of its oscillation form 0.5 to 3.
Using the graph editor we changed the way the spotlight changes its direction at the ends of its movement. The graph shows the position of the spotlight, by changing the nature if the inflection points from a hard corner to a soft gradient change, we also change the way the spotlight behaves when it changes direction from a hard jerky corner to a soft gradient change.
The second exercise was to work with the 3D editor in after effects. The vast majority of the work was actually preparing the file. The image above has been separated in Photoshop so that each layer shows only one isle of the supermarket image.
We then took each layer and arranged them in front of a camera, scaling each layer so that the image looks initially like it did to start with. This allows us to fake a level of perspective in the animation.
By moving the camera (while being careful not to move any of the layers completely out of frame) we can simulate a semi-realistic perspective shift which tricks the eye into thinking that it is looking into a three dimensional space. This effect can be compounded by adding specific effects, for example a depth of field blur, which is easily simulated in after effects.
Another interesting effect which can be added in after effects is a camera jitter. A tool called the wiggler adds camera jitter to an existing path with a set frequency and magnitude.