Sheild - After Effects

Learning After Effects

After effects is something that i only vaguely understand i learnt the basics of key framing and masking in 1st year but other than that i don't really know what im doing with it. So for this project it is something else that i am having to do for the first time and learn new skills. Al though what i am doing is not that complex or challenging for someone to create it is still useful to have a project to practice the skills on. Whilst i was looking for editor jobs online for exit velocity alot of them not only asked you to know how to edit but to be able to do basic after effects too. So this project is a simple way to start learning the basics again. 

Masking out the lights was a pretty easy task as the camera was stationary so i only had to make a new solid the same colour as the back ground and cut a whole out where the movement was, fathering and changing the shape to what suited best. Despite trying my hardest to keep the models in farm so i have something to cut around some times they moved out of place. This meant that i had to cut a shape layer around the body part of the background and key frame it so it moved with the model. 

As this was my first time doing this some of the shots are a bit badly masked and if i had more time to sit down and do them frame by frame too look the best they could,  but as the video is only for a student project shown on the internet and the cuts are rather quick one or two little masking problems isnt that noticeable. 

To make the statistics was pretty simple too,  but at first i was a little confused. I knew i had to make a layer for each thing i wanted to move then key frame its position and how i wanted to move it, but i could quite work out how to hide it when i didn't want it to be on screen. I covered it up with a white solid mask but then there was just a big grey square on the screen, after a while of clicking buttons i remember that i could use the track matt to make both the square and text invisible when i wanted it to be. 

Over all the after effects want that hard to do it was more remembering what i had learnt and  time consuiming trying to match the movements of the text. The after effects on the directors version of the film i thought wasnt that great, she wanted to include way to may facts, they moved to fast because of how the cuts went together and they were generally just to much to read and drew your attention away from the film. So in my version of the film i decided to just put 2/3 at the end to give more of an impact.