Anxiety - After Effects

Im not a big fan of after effects. It confuses me. How ever, when looking for editor jobs online most of them asked you to not only be able to edit but use after effects as well. So learning new skills in this area is pretty important for the future.

As we couldn't get a white room to film in we had to film in a green screen studio. Our initial plan was to just turn the footage black and white and mask out the lights from the background if needed. However it was thought that the film would look best if we turned the back ground white.  For most shots this was an easy task as we just had to key out the background, how ever for others it involved masking around the dancers body.  Together me and shahid  tagged teamed the after effects part of the edit, he would key out the shots and make them black and white, i would mask them out, then back to shahid to start the animation.  For some of the more complex shot, because not a lot of time left until hand in,  Lauren and Tom stepped in to help as they are more skilled at after effects than we are,  so could complete the faster.  Normally one person would take on this task over a large period  of time, how ever with only a week to complete all of the after effects it needed a team of people to get it done as fast as possible for it to look its best. Which i do not see as a problem as it showed more initiative to solve the problem in a way that worked for us rather than be like no this is my role im sticking to it.

edit team 2016 

shahid providing the banter

All thought masking is a pretty easy concept, if you have not done it before it was quite frustrating and time consuming. The main problem was how to do the shots on the floor, as turning them completely white meant that you couldn't tell she was on the floor any more. It just looked like she was floating around in some white space.  we aded a shadow underneath her to make her look a little less like she was floating by duplicating layers and adding blur, so the shadow followed her movement.

Over all the after effects wasn't too challenging. ( i feel like im saying this phrase too much for this project how ever we all used our skills to the full potential for this project, which is what made the whole process so smooth.) The main challenge was how time consuming it was for the little time we was given to do it in, how ever by working together we go it done to the best of what we all can do.