The Bubble Wrap

     Team BubbleWrap, I was the editor for team bubble wrap. Our project was to combine stop motion and live action film into one project. We got the idea from a video based on parkour but, the actors were laying on the ground. So, they were able to perform crazy, impossible feats of agility and combat. We added a twist with the bubble wrap. Every time a bubble is popped gravity shifts.  It turned out well. We couldn't get the camera straight above where we were wanting to point it, but the legs were in the way.
     The point of our project was to mix live action and stop motion animation into one project. The point of the assignment was to use people in a stop motion animation.
      I have included some rough sketches and storyboards that we had to end up scrapping because our original chosen location was scrapped due to classes taking before we could get there.

       We had to jerry-rig our setup in order to get the camera above our actors to make it look like they were standing up when they were actually on the ground. We ended up using Ian's phone to take the pictures from afar because he could set up an IR remote and take the picture. 

      What would I do Differently? I would definitely make sure we can film where we want to film so that our story boards actually do some good and our project turns out better. I would also have figured out how to lock the camera into position before we were halfway done shooting. 

      I really liked the idea of having the stop motion with people laying on their side. I would gladly do it again if given the chance. 

      I would take from this the idea that patience pays off, if I take a little longer but make sure that it is perfect it will turn out exactly as I want it to. 

      

      Here are some screenshots and the video is at the bottom.

Edit: I modified a previous title animation to better fit The Bubble Wrap. Then I used our bubble wrap to Foley in sounds to make it a little more believable. Finally, Ian created a credit sequence. Here is our final product. 

Edit #2: We presented to my class and they had some ideas that we decided to implement. We added the sound back for the stop motion part of the animation.

Here are links to all my group member's blogs.

Travis Howell

Noah Stafford 

Ian Gash 

Spencer Lindsay

Sean

Summary Part II

Conception:
     I chose to create 5 separate title animations.  I'm trying to learn all I can about Adobe After Effects. So, I figured the more tutorials I did the more I can learn about the effects in After Effects and the better I will be at using them. I got all of my tutorials from Video Copilot, created by Andrew Kramer.

Planning:
     I chose to do one animation per week. This deadline added a level of difficulty to my animations because some took more time than others and required me to focus a lot more. But the ones that were more difficult ended up looking cooler than in the tutorial due to the fact that I had to figure out some of the processes that Kramer did not explain as well as I would have liked, or my computer couldn't do that.

Creation:
     So, first things first, I watched the final product of the tutorial and decided if it would be worth doing, in only a weeks worth of time.  I did run into a snag with my energy wipe animation, because I failed to notice that it was only 9 minutes long. I originally thought that it was just a quick tutorial. However, I quickly learned it was just a extension of an already existing tutorial that was far longer than I anticipated. However, I was incredibly pleased with the final product, especially considering the very difficult time frame I gave myself. When it was all said and done, I had 5 different title animations, I condensed them all down to 1 single 30 second-ish movie file.

Self-Critique:

     I learned more with the effects in After Effects in this sort 6 week period than I learned all of last year. I learned about mesh warps, how to create optical flairs that are not already installed and pre-made, I learned how to use expression effectively on effects as well. I am incredibly pleased with how the entire thing turned out. 

Class Critique:

     Mr. Netterville after watching my animations, commented that he liked how they turned out, however, he wished that I would have put more thought into selecting the texts I used in the animations and used more originality. 

summary

This project was fun to do. Some of the tutorials turned out better than I was expecting and the addition I made to them actually made them better in my opinion.

Anyways heres my Final animation with all 5 thrown into one video.

Energy Wipe

This turned out to be my biggest project. Because when I began the tutorial, the creator of the tutorial pulled files from a different tutorial of his in order to create the energy going across the screen. That ended, well, not as good as I was hoping for.
But, I did learn how to use the effect, and I am fairly confident I could replicate it much more effectively now.

Spin Thing

So for this weeks animation I created a Spin Thing from a video copilot tutorial. This was incredibly frustrating because I could not get the layers to line up correctly in the 3d format. For some reason they would't layer correctly with the text.

But, all in all I am sort of happy with this week's title. Not nearly as happy as last week's though....

Ancient Titles

So, this one wasn't on my original plan. But, I don't have the software to make the one i was supposed to this week, so this is what I got. 

I followed the tutorial on Vidoe Copilot in order to create the project main points of the title. But, when the tutorial ended i felt the need to make it tailored to my school. So, I got a blue metal texture and overlaid my entire project with it. Then I went to the text and precomped it, so I could overland a different blue metal texture, and it just happened to have a stripe through the middle, which I thought was a nice touch. Once that was done I felt that the text blended into the background so I added a glow layer style to the precomped text layer and added the white border around the edges. 

And that is what I ended up with.

The Ring

This is my ring animation. What it is, is I created a ring from a tutorial on video copilot. I created the ring and added a ton of effects to the ring, including fractal noise, and blurs, to make the ring appear to move and squirm around on the inside.

Once I had the ring created I added 5 trap code particular effect going around in a circle, to create a simulated effect going around the ring. Once I had that entire thing done, I didn't think that that was enough. So, I added 2 more trap code particular effects in the background, to create a dust floating in the background effect.

Once I had all that done, I added in the text. However I didn't feel like that, was enough to have just the text in there, so I added a bevel and emboss effect to give it a more 3d look.

Crumble Animation

This is my final crumble animation.

           I created this crumbling effect using after effects. I first created a photoshop document containing the graphic I wanted to crumble out. Then I precomped the final so that it made it very easy to change what I want to crumble out. Then I created the shatter effect. Then I duplicated the shatter effect and changed the shatter amount and shrunk the pieces to create a micro-shatter and make the animation more believable. Then I added a feather mask to the entire project to give it a more realistic detail. All in all I am very happy with how it turned out. 

This is the version I am using for our ONW NOW opening animation.

Timeline

Crumble - Sept. 5th

• The Crumble animation should take about 2 hours to get through the tutorial
• Then it should take about 4 hours to create the actual effect
• I'm giving myself a few extra days just to be safe

Energy Wipe - Sept. 12th

• The Energy wipe should take about 6 hours to get through the tutorials
• Then it should take me another 6 hours to create the effect

Smoke - Sept. 19th

• The smoke should take me 4 hours to get through the tutorial
• Then 6 hours to create the smoke effect

The Ring - Sept 26th

• This out to take around 6 hours to get through the tutorial
• Then another 6 hours to make the effect

Disintegration - Oct 1st

• This tutorial should take 8 hours to get through
• And 2 hours to actually create the effec

Quarter 1

Hello everyone and welcome to the first quarter of my senior year!

           

            For my project 1^st quarter I have decided to instead of just doing 1 large projects, I will do 5 medium sized projects. All of which are title sequences in After Effects.

            For my First project I am doing a crumble animation. What it is, is I have a concrete background and words can crumble out of the wall.

            For my Second project I am doing an energy wipe in which what looks like energy wipes  the word onto, and then off of the screen.  

            For my Third project I am doing a disintegration one. In this one the word or title will already be on the screen and then it will disintegrate off of the screen.

            For my Fourth project I am doing a 3d ball dispersion one. This is where 3d balls of light come together to reveal my Title.

            For my Fifth project I am doing  a ring animation. What this is, is my title is surrounded by a ring of light that rotates and disintegrates a little bit in a circle.

I am excited to be doing these title animations and then figuring out in what other ways I can use and manipulate the process of making these in order to create something entirely different.