The Best After Effects Tutorials

 

Have you ever seen an amateur film with some great special effects, and asked yourself how they did it? Or how you can add the same kind of effects to your own pieces without hiring expensive professionals? It can be done with some patients and determination. My interest in After Effects first sparked when I was a junior in high school, I wanted to learn and become efficient with it. Learning special effects could bring a lot of new opportunities into my productions, so I decided to scour the internet for tutorials and any other help I could find. One of the greatest resources I discovered was videocopilot.net, and I encourage anyone interested in learning VFX to take a look at the tutorials on the site. Andrew Kramer, the tutorial master at videocopilot, makes After Effects easy to follow, and you will learn a lot. I am looking forward to taking Motion Graphics here at IC, and I hope to learn more about visual effects, and the power computers can bring to productions. Below is a tutorial showing you how you can extend a field location to match your originally desired location which just might not have been practical for you to actually get to. There are other great tutorials on videocopilot.net that are worth checking out if you have any interest in After Effects. 

That's a Wrap

Despite all the finals-related stress, it was a great experience to see the final project come together. The project was a lot of fun for me as I was able to develop my editing skills and work with new people; everyone was so passionate and wanted to make sure Dog House both looked and sounded great; Erica and Zack painstakingly color corrected each scene in After Effects while Alex made original music for the project. Their drive inspired me to do my best and I couldn't be happier with the end result.The lack of sleep we have is completely worthwhile, as I feel we've made something we can all be proud of.

Band Greeks also wrapped earlier this week, and while I'm sad to see the show end, it was an excellent learning experience. We'll be entering post-production soon, and the episodes will air this coming Spring on ICTV.

This semester has been a blast, and I'm looking forward to seeing the results of everyone's hard work tomorrow at the Fiction Field Screening. Congratulations everyone, That's a wrap!

Yer a wizard...Cody

I don't think I mentioned this before, but in my other class with Arturo, Motion Graphics & Animation, we're working on our final projects: green screening ourselves into a film.

For my final project, I decided to use Harry Potter as my film. In this scene, Professor Umbridge's evil reign of Hogwarts is about to come to an end. Fred and George Weasley use their newest products from their company, Weasley Wizard Wheezes to cause some mayhem. 

                      

My friend Cody and I ended up being set in the background of this shot, and after a lot (and I mean A LOT) of color corrections and filters, I think the shot came out pretty good. It still needs a little work, but I think it worked out pretty well! 

Have a good weekend everyone!

Motion Graphics and Animation!

So this post isn't really entirely Fiction Field Production related, and I'm sorry. I hope you can forgive me. BUT it is about Motion Graphics and Animation, so it'll be super cool, I promise.
I ended up enrolling in not one, but two of Arturo's classes this semester and I decided to post today about the other one, Motion Graphics, because we're all thinking about registration about this time of the semester.
SO. The class, which meets twice a week, deals with learning animation and effects in Adobe After Effects. We've also spent some time discussing other programs, including Photoshop and Maya, but we spend most of our time learning After Effects.

After Effects Launch Menu

So far this semester we've learned various elements of After Effects, including how to use rotoscope, motion tracking, green screen, color correction, and we've played with many of the effects that come with After Effects. 

Our first assignment that we completed on our own was a music project. We had to pick a song that we liked and make a graphic video to accompany it. Some people made lyric videos, which are becoming very popular on YouTube. Others made more interpretive videos, but all of them were really cool, and it was interesting to see how everyone interpreted the assignment. 

For my project, I did the song "Radioactive" by a band called Imagine Dragons. I really liked the feel and the beat of the song, and I used it to create my general theme of "red" and "sparks." 

My Lyric Video Project

I really liked this project because it gave me a chance to figure out After Effects for myself, and use the information I learned in class. I used many of the effects I learned in the class, but I also utilized one of our class resources. This great website, Videocopilot.net specializes in 3D effects in After Effects and other various motion graphics software.

If you're interested in motion graphics and animation, feel free to ask me about the class! Good luck with registration :)

Rotoscoping: Frame by Frame is Heartless

For some reason I’ve been listening to a lot of rap music lately; Childish Gambino, Aesop Rock, etc. However, while watching the music video for Kanye West’s song “Heartless,” I was fascinated by the video’s unique style of animation. I quickly Googled the song and learned that the images were produced via rotoscoping.

Rotoscoping is a painstaking style of animation that involves tracing frame by frame over captured footage. Max Fleischer originated the technique, which he first performed by tracing a projected frame over a transparent canvas, and then tracing it. While rotoscoping obviously takes an incredible amount of time, detail and attention, the results can be very rewarding as the animations produced have an incredibly surreal lifelike quality to them.

After doing some more research, I learned that rotoscoping is also used to produce special effects like the glow of a lightsaber. If you’re feeling ambitious, you can practice rotoscoping a lightsaber in After Effects; just remember to animate each frame!

This video shows two hours of rotoscoping work... in nine seconds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiknjHjk0Os

do able FX

so i've seen this once or twice before on youtube and i thought it was kinda cool so i thought i'd share it on the blog. Its a youtube channel called indiemogel and it has a lot of film making tips for our level of film making. They teach some after effect and real physical effects which i found pretty cool most of the effects they show cost around 60 dollars and i think they really add something to the scenes they are in, check them out.

this one teaches you how to smash a wall


this one shows you how to make a scott pilgram punch effect





and lastly this one shows how to get a real cut throat shot

update

our GDK is finally complete. we had a major continuity error that was holding us up for a bit BUT we worked around it with our shot variety and sound after effects. turned out pretty good and i'm happy with it. on a side note, I made a rug today.. thought that was pretty cool haha

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Day for Night

Here a quick and dirty (and ugly:-) composite I just did against your background. I shot myself against a green fabric, with light coming from my window (too cold outside, hehe) , flipped it contrasted, desaturated and tinted the image to match the "light" on the parking lot. As a detail I added a "reflection" of the background in my glasses like we mentioned in class.

green screens are pretty sick

today in class we shot a short scene from our GDK and after we got everything in place i was really impressed with exactly what was possible with the green screen. i mean it had reflections from our background on things like the desk. after effects looks like it does a lot of the work, or maybe arturo just made it look easy, probably the latter. we did have some scares as far as styrofoam ceilings go but im really glad we did that in class today i think i learned a lot

After-Effects and its amazingness

The end of class kind of blew my mind. After taking nearly the entire class to set up the lights and scene I figured we wouldn't be able to actually make a finished product. Once Arturo put the footage in, it took him 5 minutes to make a realistic scene. I thought it was amazing. That after-effects automatically made the reflection on the desk fit with the scene, that was awesome. Just how fast the process was and how many options you have to tweak things and make it look exactly how you want, I thought it was incredible.

Detonation Films

I forgot to mention this when we had that presentation on FX with the exploding head. For those who don't have Adobe After Effects or some other program with a blood-gush generator, there's a site where you can download blood, explosions, bullets, and a bunch of other SF stock footage put against solid backgrounds, making it easy to key into you videos. Most of the good stuff costs money, but you can get some pretty good free samples that work well. It's worked well for me in the past.

Quick&Dirty

So this is a really quick and dirty compositing. Shot with an iPhone in class against a small blue board, composited, tracked and keyed in After Effects. Total time about 15 min. I added some subtle "light movement" to the still background which we downloaded from the internet.

And, oh, yes I added a street ambient downloaded from freesound.org

A simple example of what effects are all about and how they liberate you from impossible locations etc.

Here are the elements of the composite:

Super Mario FX

I think this is a cool example that relates to one of the proposed Golden Doorknob ideas.