13/4/2022 - 20/4/2022 / Week 3 - Week 4
Trinity Wong Ka Yi / 0348778
Digital Photography and Imaging / Bachelor of Design in Creative Media / Taylor's University
Final Project - Self-titled
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LECTURES
WEEK 10 - INTRODUCTION TO AFTER EFFECTS
After Effects is a software that specializes in animation, visual effects and motion picture compositing. It has some similar features to Premiere Pro, but is quite different overall. Compositions are important in After Effects to keep everything organized.
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PROGRESS
Week 10
Class activity - Animation
I decided to go with a narrative of an author typing a story out, and the projector projects how he imagines it. The story starts with a shark appearing along with a fencer and they fight to the death.
Fig 1.2 Progress of the exercise.
Fig 1.2 Progress of the exercise.
Fig 1.3 Final outcome of the exercise.
Week 12
Final Project - Poster
For the poster, I had two ideas. One was a simple futuristic hologram floating in the air while I use it and it contains my 'inventory' which was supposed to show off the things I like. The second idea was to make my face a screen that said Error 404 as a USB tries to plug into my head. Mr Fauzi let me which one I preferred and I thought it would be cooler to go with the first one and try to make it look somewhat realistic as a challenge.
Fig 2.1 & Fig 2.2 Sketch ideas.
Week 13
Moving on to the shooting part, I actually did it at night so that the room was as dark as possible. Then I used some LED lights to wrap around the camera lens to light up the front of my face, then I used my PC monitor on my side as the side light.
Because my camera had no flippy screen, I had to do tons of trial and error. I shot in bursts of 3 with 1 second apart so I could take my chance and hopefully one of them is suitable. At first, since it was a low-light situation, I ended up using manual focus as the camera could not autofocus. So I started out taking like 10 shots trying to find the correct distance. Once I got it right, I added a jacket to look more presentable and also add to the blue tones. Eventually, after 23756293 blur shots that I deleted along the way because I forgot I needed them for progress, these were the final sharp shots to show my progress. Why did I delete them during shooting? Because I was shooting in RAW and I need the space in my SD card HAHAHA. As for why did I shoot in RAW? To make up for the quality in case it was all blur in the end.
Fig 2.5 Shots taken.
With the selection of (technically) 9 photos, I went with the one with my hand closest to my face because I realized that I should have shot in portrait because our poster is portrait and I might not have enough space but IT'S OKAY BECAUSE I CAN FIX IT IN POST RIGHT? (Spoilers: I did.)
So I took my RAW photo and imported it into Adobe Lightroom to tweak the lighting and colours. During shooting, I made the LED light more or a teal colour because I thought futuristic things are usually that tone. But I realized that somehow making it even cooler made it cooler. (Haha, get it?) Anyway, I tweaked the colours first because that's how I usually edit photos then only tweaked the lighting. To be honest, it's not much difference because I was quite satisfied with the look of it already.
Fig 2.6 - Fig 2.8 Editing progress in Adobe Lightroom.
Actually, I don't know why I had to use the healing tool because I was going to cut that part out anyway in the poster but I guess it's because it was bothering me haha.
Once I was done with the photo, I imported it into Photoshop and started to form the poster. Halfway through, I realized that the inventory idea would probably take a lot of time as I would have to individually take photos of each of them with the correct lighting. So I went for more of a news article approach. Although it doesn't show much, I actually like keeping up with the news because it's good to be aware of what's happening around you and around the world. So I improvise by making the news articles related to things I like. Since it was flipped anyway and nobody would read the text unless they really wanted too, I just used Lorem Ipsum. And here's the final poster draft.
Week 14
Final Project - Animation
After a short feedback session from Mr Fauzi, I added a background so it does not look as plain. I searched up some photo of a lobby that was out of focus on purpose and made it dark and blue to match the aesthetic. Then I started animation to try out and see how it would look like.
Fig 3.1 Testing out the effects and laying the foundations for the animation.
Fig 3.2 Animation draft progress.
Feeling like something was missing, I added a second 'article' behind me to create another background and it makes more sense to not have an empty panel for no reason. I chose Game Globe because it sounds very cliche and I like games. I also changed the body text from Lorem Ipsum to internet copypasta relating to the topics for fun, like an Easter egg to those that actually try to read it. The added article also plays a role in the animation. And so, I finalized my poster.
Fig 3.3 Finalized poster.
Now that the poster was finalized, I moved on to finalizing the animation. I decided to make the panels swap articles when I touch them. I also made the panel blink 3 times as if it is cueing me to touch it and change the article. This made the animation less boring. And since it still felt empty, I wanted to add a glitch when I touch the panels. So I added a glitch effect from a free extension called Motion Bros. Since I only wanted the effect to affect the panels, I had to make pre-compositions.
Fig 3.4 & Fig 3.5 Pre-comp for the front card and back card glitch effects.
Now all that was left was finding a song to match the animation. Knowing I was looking for a more EDM-like song to go with the futuristic style, I went through my Spotify playlist.
Fig 3.6 My playlist of very bassy EDM songs.
Fig 3.7 Added the audio into After Effects.
In the end, I chose All My Friends by Madeon because it somewhat synced with the already made animation and because the chorus somewhat matches with the concept by saying, "All my friends are watching, I can hear them talking" as if it is about news. But I still made a few adjustments since I wanted the blinking and touching to somewhat sync with the song. And after much work, here is the final animation!
Fig 3.8 Final animation.
Fig 3.4 & Fig 3.5 Pre-comp for the front card and back card glitch effects.
Fig 3.6 My playlist of very bassy EDM songs.
Fig 3.7 Added the audio into After Effects.
In the end, I chose All My Friends by Madeon because it somewhat synced with the already made animation and because the chorus somewhat matches with the concept by saying, "All my friends are watching, I can hear them talking" as if it is about news. But I still made a few adjustments since I wanted the blinking and touching to somewhat sync with the song. And after much work, here is the final animation!
Fig 3.8 Final animation.
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FEEDBACK
Week 12: Good progress, can choose whichever one you like more.
Week 13: Good progress! But for the animation plan, instead of swiping the panels, move my hand forward and touch the panels to swap them. Since it is a still image, it is much easier and simpler compared to swiping it as it will look smoother.
Week 14: Great work! Simple and nice. Has foreground and background to create depth.
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