Investigation Post 11/14

 Work Log

Monday: After Effects Introduction

Tuesday: After Effects Tutorial Watching

Wednesday: After Effects Tutorial Watching

Thursday: Experimented with Adobe After Effects

Friday: Experimented with Adobe After Effects

After Effects

During my film, I want to superimpose minor animations over my footage at various points. While Premiere Pro can do this for me, I decided to look into how to use After Effects as a possible alternative. This week, I went through a couple of tutorial videos and the Learning Tab within the application to learn the basics of After Effects. Here are a few of the things I learned.

As well, here is a tutorial video that I found useful followed by a much more in depth walkthrough that really goes into how the basics function within the software.

                    

In this screenshot, I have learned how to start a new composition, how to add assets into my project tab, and how layers work. Starting a new composition is as easy as selecting in the composition tab either starting a new composition from nothing or a new composition from previously produced footage. Adding assets is also easy, as on just needs to double click their Project Tab and add files. And layers work with having one above another makes it in front of those underneath it.

In this image, the timeline is put into focus. I learned about messing with the effects of a given asset within this step. There's position (up and down), scale (size of the asset), rotation, and opacity (how visible/transparent the asset is) in te4rms of basic effect controls of a given asset. Furthermore, I learned how to add keyframes onto them. By clicking the stopwatch icon on an effect, you turn on key frames for the asset. You can see the specific key frame settings on the timeline to the right, where there are those little diamonds.

As a final show of progress within my education for basic use of Adobe After Effects, I put everything I learned together to transition from image A to image B through keyframing. It starts with simply a video with a mirror effect centered on its middle, but a few things happen after it. The logo that is seen at the center of the second image slides up from the bottom of the screen (out of frame) to the center. Then, after the key frames end for the logo, the opacity of the APEAK caption goes from 0% to 100%. Lastly, a fast box blur is keyframed from the beginning to the end of the project to give focus to the APEAK logo and caption. In the end, the Learning Tab was admittedly more helpful than I thought it would turn out to be.