Dominique’s Animation year 1 blog, BA1b Part 2

I thought I would personalise my show reel with motion graphic text to create an better impression, I am yet to attempt  this myself in Adobe After Effects, but the idea of animating text in Adobe After Effects and then exporting in Premier is a great idea. Even if I am not able to follow this tutorial directly, I can use my new skills animating in After Effects from the Lip Sync Project to aid me and experimentation to make cool text.

Week 3 (Week 30) (4 th of May 2018) This week I decided to research into how to make moving titles and logos in after effects for premiere Pro and other tutorials that may be helpful. I also added more to my show reel, However I am struggling to find my animation footage still, so currently not all work is there.

Week 3 (Week 30) (4 th of May 2018) This week I carried on drawing the mouths in Photoshop, and continuing research on the side. Once completing all of the layered drawings, I saved each face with the different mouth as an image and then edited it in Photoshop to make my very own mouth chart. Once I finished this, I began animating my lip sync till it was complete. I am happy how it came out, it was a quick process and I am now confident in animating in After Effects, however animating took a day and a half as a kept re editing it to fit the sounds perfectly, I which I used a longer sound track so I could further experiment with the facial expressions I could make.   

I finally finished my lip sync video; At first it took me a while to draw all of the lips, drawing them from scratch on photoshop with reference sheets from research online. When it came to animation it, the only time consuming part was refining it to perfectly hit the sound note and referencing my mouth chart. This was the quickest and smoothest animating, and this enabled me to become much more confident in animating in Adobe After Effects. I now know how to rotate, animate changing size, position and such. It was also very interesting learning how to Lip Sync, which was soon easy to grasp. I Look forward to using this technology in future projects. Personally I feel I could have done better design and drawn mouths, but as this was a quick project I only used my mouse instead of a drawing graphics tablet to get more refined details. I could also later aim to ad more expressive looks, to fit the words and moods being set, how ever we were limited to the sounds we could use, mine tha...

Week 9, (Week 30) (Friday the 4 th of May, 2018) Mystery Box This week was very hectic. I tried to make the heels once again out of milliput, this time making it directly onto the wire. However, it did not set in time, and whilst I tried to dry them out overnight, one of the shoes fell off. On Monday I had to cut off parts of my puppets legs off (The foam and skin), Brake off the Milliput and sand it down. I then formed the Legs wire into feet. Because of this, my puppet became greatly shorter and less like her original design. I then began making her feet again, (the fourth attempt) using Milliput. This time a much simpler design without heels. I left it to dry and collected the next day, (In an over 24 hour period of time) taking her feet to be drilled by the 3D workshop, enabling her feet to be pinned for balance when it comes to doing the stop motion. Once the hard part of the feet was done, I focused on sorting the head out. I repainted the front, painted the added w...

This is my stop motion footage, the unfinished version using DragonFrame (At 24F/P). I am yet to edit the green screen (keying it, and adding my background) and add effects using Adobe After Effects. Unfortunately I had issues in keeping my puppet balanced and stable. The pins would not hold her feet down. Especially when and after I tried to do a walk cycle. I found not have one foot even lightly in the air with only the use of the pins. I had to use what I could find, luckily there was a green sponge being used as a pin cushion, that I used to stable her. Although I knew it would making editing harder and also mess with the physical movement of her skirt, it was green enabling it to  be masked hopfully. Unfortunately, using the sponge gave much limits, and her walk cycle did not function. As she begins to walk it skips in time and gives a much unrelastic and failed walk, sadly.

http://tubularinsights.com/key-green-screen/ How-to Key Green Screen Footage with Adobe After Effects When I keyed my green screen background, I had pixelated edges, some parts of the box had gone opaque and some parts of the background was still there due to some rough batches in the green screen. Not sure how resolve this, I decided to do some researching. I found an article on how to make my screening much bolder and clearer, with an YouTube video as guidance. I learned how to use the effects after keying. This is the result after using keying and the effects.