Showreel

During the showreel class I had my mind occupied by the Collide Show however during the class I got inspired by a showreel that Sara showed us, it had a logo or shape in the centre of the screen throughout the video and it really caught my eye and I wanted to make something from that.

I have done a few folding animations in the past but none of them haven't really gone anywhere, I didn't expect this one to either but I played around with it a bit more and a new colour palette worked a lot better with my final showreel.

Sea

I've been playing around with some ideas in After Effects and creating gifs in Photoshop, this one had a few issues with playing online so I've had to upload it to vimeo as well. The idea for this experiment came about when looking at someones visual research during a lecture, the image was an illustration of the sea which was in a handcrafted style, I particularly liked the shape of the waves in the image I saw, after looking at it for a while I might add some pattern into the waves and some texture to give it more depth.

Fairytale Motion Graphics

Fairytale Motion Graphics from Phoebe Whitehead on Vimeo.

During this motion graphics class we were asked to get inspiration from fairytales to create our own statistics and illustrations. I took inspiration from the fairytale Rapunzel, one of the things I will take from this lesson is how to create a tilt shift look on the work, it is a pretty simple technique that requires me to create a composition seperate from the one I used to create the animation I wish to manipulate, the original compostion must be imported into the new one and then all you have to do is press 3d mode and play around with the angle of the animation layer.

Paper London

Paper London Animation from Phoebe Whitehead on Vimeo.

In this class we were shown more of the animation presets in After Effects, this class also made use of the camera option during the animation. I had already created an illustration from some images I took of a trip to London but decided to use another illustration I made that day.
I originally wanted to use the camera to pull through the layers to look like the viewer is walking through streets in london but because I ended up using a move fixed image that had too much detail to zoom in that far. I'm really happy with the end result and that I managed to combine some work I did outside of uni that was inspired by the task for the class.

After doing this I want to create a set of worlds with similar zone outs to this but with images of York. The end result might be interesting especially with the comparison between modern London and a more historic York skyline. 

Notes:
toggle switch 3d, 2 views top and front - setup
Effect > colour correction - also good for editing in future
Layer > New Camera - make sure one view is active camera

Handdrawn Animation

Heart Animation from Phoebe Whitehead on Vimeo.

For this After Effects class we were asked to create an image or word that has been drawn digitally or by hand. The image had to be traced over and saved as jpgs so we could then import into After Effects as a jpeg sequence.  My drawings were created by hand then transferred into illustrator, the specific brush tool is one I downloaded that replicates a marker pen. The tracing animation is created by using the image mask tool and using the pen tool to draw around the drawing outline, the lines thickness needs to cover the whole pen outline so when the mask excludes the background it doesn't crop a bit out the design. To make the animation look like it was drawing the heart I then used the effect Generate > Stroke.

Fox Rotoscope from Phoebe Whitehead on Vimeo.

In this class we used the mask layer and the pen tool to cut out a moving object from a video. After tracing around the character in one frame I clicked the stop watch on Mask Path so it would move fluidly in the animation through the whole video when I adjusted the path each frame.

After successfully tracing around my character in the 2 second clip we had to stretch the 2 seconds to 10 seconds in a new composition, however I only stretched it to 5 seconds so the jumping movement would still look natural. After editing it to 5 seconds I looped the clip to last 10 seconds. I then added a background and animated that so it moved slightly as well, adding a a green overlay on the fox video so it looks slightly handdrawn.


Rotoscope Fox Experiment from Phoebe Whitehead on Vimeo.

After the class I played around with adding wings to the fox which I will edit further later so they have texture on top to see if I can make it fit in more with the animation.

Bubble Man from Phoebe Whitehead on Vimeo.

For this animation lesson I just wanted to use basic vector drawings so it was easier to animate it all. They were all relatively easy to piece together at the beginning and had to be on different layers so I could animate seperate pieces on the character.

After getting to a point where I was happy with the final animation I grabbed some texture for the character and the background and overlayed it on certain layers using Track Matte.

Some shortcuts from the lesson:
t = transparency
p = position
r = rotation
s = scale
a = anchor point
u =  to show key frames

After finishing the class I also added sound to make the animation short more engaging and exciting.