After Effects Introduction

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In the introduction to After Effects we were asked to create a short movie advert
involving a selection of images or video. I chose to create an advert for a comedy,
the music I selected is taken from the beginning of  Escape by Rupert Holmes which
fitted the theme of my movie perfectly. The beat of the song allowed me to pack
a lot of information in and made the advert more exciting to watch.

I firstly edited my music in a new composition and cut it down to 15 seconds. After completing that I could then move it into another composition for the main video, this is so that if I edit the track on the music composition the copied composition in the video would be automatically edited.

I then played through the track a few times and placed markers at the same time so I could mark the exact time a new beat played.

The marker shortcut is * or x on the number pad.

To animate the type I firstly had to lay out all my type in the position I wanted it on the screen and on the timeline, I then went into underneath each layer to start editing. Unless you want type to come up individually by each character you can leave the option Anchor Point Grouping to be on Character; but for my video it had to be fast and easy to read so I needed the letters to come up by Word. The next option I had to change was scale I needed to change it to 0%. Then all I had to do was drag the time indicator to the start of the layer and click the stopwatch next to scale then drag the time indicator to where I wanted my text to stop transitioning and become full text and edit scale back to 100% and click the stop watch to finish.

To quickly set this to all my words on the frame I went into Animation>Save Animation Preset. After that you can click on each layer and simply go into Animation>Apply Animation Preset and select your saved preset.

In the latest lesson we were shown a website called cuteststockfootage.com which has all  effects that you can overlay onto footage to make it look grainy or to add lens flares etc. I didn't really want to use it on my photographs I thought it wouldn't work as well as on video so I used animation I found in the background of my text. I wanted to use it only at certain times the technique to do this is the same as adding photographs at certain times on the timeline only you have to make sure the layer for the animation is under the type.