As I’m returning to uni for 2010 tomorrow, I thought it might be best to finish off the last couple of entries from 2009. Wow, this is embarrassingly late.
I’m probably not able to recall an accurate description of my process at this stage, so I should probably let the work tell the story…
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ProcessThe ‘rostrum camera’ project was the most testing for me in Digital Video 2. If you’re not familiar with the concept of a rostrum camera, it is used often in documentaries or other films where there may not be access to moving image – a documentary about the First Fleet landing in Australia in 1788 would be a good example. To add some dynamism to the images, the camera will pan or zoom across the surface of the image. One of the best known examples of this – and one which was offered to us in class – is Chris Marker’s excellent La Jetée from 1962. This film was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s (also brilliant) 12 Monkeys…
For the most part, I really enjoyed working with After Effects this semester, but as I’m a novice with the moving image, there are more than a few caveats which I stumbled across in my enthusiasm. Being the trouble child in class, I didn’t want to go down the route of using only 2-dimensional images. After Effects actually has some excellent tools for working in 2.5D (the difference between 2.5D and 3D is generally fairly academic here, but if you want to know more, Wikipedia is your friend), so I wanted to put them to use, whilst still exploiting the visual effect of flat surfaces.
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I’ve approached this project in reverse to how I would have done things in the past. However, it’s probably more of a realistic workflow when approaching a ‘real world’ job. Instead of starting with images, which are forced into some kind of storyline, I began with a text, which I turned into a script of sorts, before storyboarding and then creating a soundtrack to edit the visuals to.
This probably seems like a pretty obvious method, but as is often the way when trying to pump out uni projects quickly – things don’t always happen in order. Many times, the pre-production work is quickly slapped together at the end of a project, just to get the marks. It’s a fairly cynical, but realistic situation many times during your uni career.
Wonderfully understated sexism from the 1960's. The colours are nice, too. Image: http://retrorenovation.com
After completing the storyboard, I had a think about how I would like the ‘look’ of the images to come across. I did some research into 1960′s homes and found the gem above. I’m a huge fan of the colours and typesetting of this era, and whilst I won’t be using much in the way of type, I’m hoping I will be able to do some colour treatment on my images (if I ever get the photo shoot done) to give them a warm, aged feel.
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We went through the basics of keying (or matting) in both the lecture and tutorial this week. Programs like After Effects have really made this process much easier than it used to be. It doesn’t take much digging through older music videos to see what a nightmare it must’ve been (though I’m sure some of these video creators would argue that this is a pre-meditated effect)…
(Yes, the above is a shameless Severed Heads plug. Buy the music and tell them I sent you, so I get better marks at uni)
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I missed (read: skipped) this week’s lecture, so seeing as it was a presentation week in the tutorial, there was no classwork for me to speak of. I did, however, spend a ridiculous amount of time in After Effects, finishing off the first assignment for this subject.
I still think that After Effects has the most enjoyable learning curve of any graphic software package I’ve come across. Not to say that it was an easy experience – I spent a good while shouting at the co-ordinates for not behaving as I believed that they should. Yet, unlike programs like Maya or Flash, After Effects gives you a good amount of instant gratification when things do go according to plan.
Whilst the final outcome did differ from my storyboard and plan, they really did go a long way to helping me structure my kinetic type. I broke passages down into 5 second groups and in the end, only went around 10 seconds or so over time. What I did try to achieve in this piece was a heavily graphic focus. I believe that when working with type, the negative space is as important as the type itself, so in fitting with Bukowski’s poem, this piece was all about opposing forces – both male and female and the positive and negative visual space…
Of course, there are many things I would change if asked to start this project again. However, I did get to spend a lot of time with After Effects and learnt a great deal. For my very first After Effects project, I’m fairly happy with the result and actually looking forward to spending more time with the software. Considering how hard I am to please, that’s a pretty big wrap.
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My post-rate over the past week or so resembles the Global Financial Crisis
Life (work + uni + Concrete) has killed my Uni Journal for Week 3. Which is a shame, because it was looking like I could really overachieve well into Week 5, or even Week 6.
So instead of trying to cover everything from a week or so back, I’m posting an apology by way of a hastily downloaded image and a promise that I’ll get back on track in the next few days, with some Week 4 madness. Prepare yourselves, because it’s all unbelievably amazing stuff.
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We spent some time with After Effects this week, coming to terms with kinetic type. Kinetic type is pretty much what is says on the tin: it depends on movement for its impact. It’s pretty much everywhere you look these days as far as motion graphics is concerned, with film titles particularly beating the form into a bloody, quivering pulp.
Like Photoshop, After Effects is packed full of presets and this is probably where all kinetic type starts to look the same. However, there are some pretty nifty editing tools in After Effects that I was impressed by, particularly the graph editor, which allows you to change the curve of any given effect to make it your own. So really, there are no excuses for lazy kinetic work. Just lazy blog posts.
I had a look around for other kinetic type work on the World Wide Web and found many good and many terrible examples. The following may not be perfect, but each of them has at least one interesting idea that caught my eye…
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I’ve been looking forward to starting Digital Video 2 for a while now. Motion graphics are one area that I’ve never really had the opportunity to really try my hand at, but unlike my struggle with 3D last semester, I’m still quite enthusiastic to learn.
After Effects is also an exciting prospect, as it’s one of the few programs that I hear mostly good things about. Perhaps it’s because there’s a smaller community using it than say, Photoshop or Illustrator, but it sounds as though it’s one of those rare beasts: software that’s mostly enjoyable to use. It’s going to be our best friend for at least the first two-thirds of this subject.
Less impressive are Adobe’s lessons, found in their tutorial book. Similarly to my experience with Pro Tools and Ableton, the content provided in tutorials is pretty cheesy at best. Nevertheless, it was exciting to dig around in a CS4 product that appears to have finally followed through with Adobe’s long-touted promise to make their products play nicely together. Being able to take a Photoshop document, mix it with a Quicktime movie, Illustrator vectors and MP3s files, then composite and animate it whilst retaining the editable layer styles from other programs, and finally outputting it as, say, a Flash movie, is a pretty exciting prospect.
Perhaps Adobe learnt from the train wreck that is Digidesign’s dTV and decided to use content from the excellent lynda.com. After watching a couple of their ‘Getting Started’ videos, I’m hopeful that there’s going to be quite a lot of information out there for a novice like myself.
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