1st 16 seconds

The first 16 seconds of my title sequence.

1st 16 seconds. from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

transitions - 909

Been testing out the transition from the first part of my title sequence into the next. The first part is based on an old computer screen used for the Fairlight CMI (which I will have to make more obvious) and the second part is based on the design of Roland Tr-909's. I figure it'd be pretty cool and convenient to switch the Fairlight screen into an LED panel, which allows me to zoom out of it revealing a 909 vectored image. Even though I have put these ideas down on a storyboard, once actually beginning to create it the timings are never what I expect, not really an issue though.

909 transition 1 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

909 transition 2 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

CMI Ident progress

Nearly finished my first ident; got it to a stage where it could be considered nearly complete. The first video shows some progress, the second one is a complete ten second sequence. There's not audio yet but I'm moving onto that soon, narrowed down a few tracks to use but I just need to get them to the correct speed to match the animations.

CMI ident test 5 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

CMI IDENT 6 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

CMI Ident tests

Some development videos for the first ident I am making, which is based on the computer screen used with a Fairlight CMI (an old synthesizer). I came to the conclusion that due to there being so many layers to deal with, I'd give this one a go first and then hopefully the others will be a little less heavy. 

CMI ident test 1 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

CMI Ident test 2 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

CMI Ident test 3 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

CMI Ident test 4 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

Obviously there is still a fair amount of work to do on this, but I'm happy with how it's going so far. 10 seconds almost feels like not enough time, so it is going to be tricky to fit everything within that timeframe whilst still maintaining an un-cluttered sort of feel.

storyboards...

Some quick storyboarding for the title sequence, nothing too detailed as I'm fairly sure in my mind of how I want it to go...plus there are only so many ways in which a drum machine/synth can be animated effectively, in my opinion...although this could just be me being narrow-minded and set on how I can see it in my head at the moment. 

No consideration to colour yet.....as I don't have any coloured pens. 

Type Session 3

Third type session, involving arranging some information onto a flyer.

Version 1:

and Version 2:

AfterEffects Software Workshop 24/1

ADVANCED KEYFRAME TECHNIQUES

back to solid shapes.

select all layers and press U to see all animated properties.

Shapes currently moving across the screen at constant speed. What we're going to look at is acceleration/deceleration, to give the animations a much more natural feel.

First way we're looking it is AE's quick and easy way of doing it.

In the animation menu we can select 'Easy Ease Out' and apply this to the first keyframe (we're going to do this to the green box to start with)

The spacing of the keyframe dots become closer together, making the green box start off slower and speed up, in a more naturally accelerating way.

For the blue box, we are going to use 'Easy Ease In' to cause it to decelerate towards the second keyframe.

Therefore it will start off a bit faster, allowing it time to decelerate.

And finally, with the grey box, we select 'Easy Ease'. which will cause it to accelerate AND decelerate, which is the most natural way of movement.

We can also view the timeline as a graph:

Using this, we can have a greater control over the speed of the action (in this case, change of position). The graph above shows the linear movement of the red solid.

The image below shows the motion graph of the green solid:

We can change the shape of the graph to make certain actions more pronounced:

There's a couple of quite basic methods for affecting the speed of actions.


Couple of test videos taken from the first part of this session

softwareworkshop5vid1 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.





softwareworkshop5vid2 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.




Making use of these skills to create a quick pendulum animation.





softwareworkshop5vid3 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.




Parent Child Relationships:


It is possible to assign layers as 'children' to a particular layer. As this might suggest; the 'child' layer constantly follows the parent BUT can still move freely within various boundaries. 

NESTED COMPOSITIONS:

We can combine (nest) layers using the pre-compose tool:

The layers have been replaced with one layer called 'car'

Changes can now be made in the 'car' composition, and this will automatically change the the 'car' that's nested in another composition...slightly like linking files in InDesign.


And a quick video combining all the skills learnt in this session. Pretty amusing little video:





softwareworkshop5vid5 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

Type Session 2

Second week of Type Design.

We began by using our chose typeface (Gotham) for a suitable brand/identity. I chose Barack Obama, as this was the actual typeface used in his campaign. Looks quite suitable:

We also used the typeface for a brand/identity that was in some ways unsuitable and inappropriate. I chose Paperchase, as their usual type has a very hand-drawn aesthetic. In this typeface, the word does not represent the brand in the same way.

We were then set our task for the session, which was to arrange some information to fit a 30mm x 60mm box, including a frame, which would be pretty much standard size for a very small yellow pages advert. Here was the information:

I then numbered each piece of information relating to its importance; i.e. which should read first in the advert.

I chose to divide the canvas into two areas; as I thought realistically this would be the most effective way to show 10 pieces of information

After much messing around (attempting to fit that much information into such a small space is not the easiest of tasks) I eventually arrived at this :

And this is how it would look at 100%. The image is slightly blurred here but would hopefully look a bit more crisp once printed.

Type task 01: Typeface analysis

First task set for our Optional Module (Type). We had to pick a typeface, in my case a sans serif, and analyse what sets this apart from others, in terms of construction, shape, key letters etc. as well as making some comparison to Helvetica. 

Type Session 1

First Optional Module session. Spent this time getting to grips with Quark Xpress, a programme very commonly used in the industry, perhaps more so than InDesign. Generally just messed about with letterforms, making cool patterns and stuff.

Quick test

404808909 quick test from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

Just a quick animation I made earlier on today. Nothing special really, but I almost felt as if I had to make something just to help clarify the direction I need to be heading in.

Progress Crit 18/1

A second progress crit for the Top 10 brief; generally bringing ideas to the table and looking at the work of others. I'd left it a bit late to get a huge amount of stuff ready for it, although I did have a few basic storyboard sketches and some visual references:

The sketches were quite basic but gave an idea of the style of animation that would be involved. At this stage however they didn't really give much of a clue as to the aesthetics of the sequence, which is where the visual references came in handy.

Here are the crit sheets....what people wrote about my work....:

Generally the main concern was that I had not really indicated anything about colour schemes at this stage, which I will move onto shortly. Other than that, with a few more storyboards and timelines, I should be soon ready to start animating.

Audio selection

I've pretty much decided on a track to use for the title sequence; I chose this track by someone named Dusky, though I'm not sure what the actual track is called. Here it is:





I'm particularly thinking of using it from 1:18 onwards, as before that is quite a long intro. From 1:18 onwards it's quite a nice solid electronic housey beat that would hopefully be quite effective without being too much of a distraction from the actual sequence itself.

Realistically the only problem with it is that it's a 2012 beat, meaning it's probably not been made using too much actual hardware; the samples will more than likely have been manipulated beyond what was possible with actual original hardware. Regardless, the beat will have almost definitely have been made using digital drum racks and synths..

A few notes

A few notes I made a bit earlier on, detailing (in quite a general way) the type of content that I will need to start collecting for the Top 10 title sequence. It is quite vague to be fair but I should be able to use the collected images to start creating storyboards and timelines.

I have slightly re-defined the Visual Concept for the sequence; I am aiming to begin the sequence with a very clean-cut, factory-fresh plastic kind of aesthetic, as if it was the first time someone had switched their synth/drum machine on. As it moves through the aesthetics will start to appear a little more decayed, broken and rusty as if it were representing the life of one of these machines. It would also represent the change in technology over the years; with the introduction of DAW's many pieces of hardware have been left in the cupboards in a state of disrepair. I could also potentially edit the sounds used to start off crisp and slowly become more and more distorted and broken; to match the aesthetic changes.

AfterEffects software workshop 17/1

First things first, make sure the composition settings are as shown below:

Creating TEXT in AfterEffects:

Grab the type tool in the bar at the top, click somewhere in the composition and begin writing.

Of course we can change the size/font etc.

Along side the standard Transformation controls; there are also some text properties that appear when a text box is created:

The anchor point of a text box is in a DIFFERENT LOCATION. It is possible however to reposition the anchor point:

However also by selecting the 'Pan Behind' tool you can move the anchor point without the layer itself being repositioned. Here it is:

Text-specific functions.

Here we've got rid of the last words and set a keyframe:

At each keyframe  I added the next word, so therefore each word will appear after various intervals. The square keyframe represents a keyframe hold; as in there is no interpolation.

There are few other formatting properties that are specific to text. With these it is possible to change the colour, size etc. of individual letters and whatnot:

By selecting the 'animate' button we can obtain further options:

This will show up as 'Animator 1'.


Similarly to the Transform options, we can change the positions of text:

And we can also alter how much of the text is being affected using the 'Range Selector' tools:

These are fairly complicated and I will have to return to these when I have more time.


There are also some advanced tools to get involved with:

For example, we can choose to deal with the Range Selector in terms of specific characters as opposed to percentages, as this may be more accurate.

After Effect text test from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.


We can also deal with the anchor points in similar ways to when importing a Composition.

When scaling for example. we can go into the 'more options' section and change how the word will be affected; whether the individual characters or the whole word becomes affected.

Once again by messing about with the Range Selector tools we can change how the transformation occurs:

Therefore it is possible to determine when each individual letter will be animated. By controlling the smoothness, we can decide how sharply the letters transform into their next state, as shown below. With a smoothness of 0% the letters will pretty much snap from one state to the next.

We can go on to add additional properties to the Animator, for example tracking:

which can be used to avoid collisions and whatnot.

We can also use paths to affect the location of the text; using the 'Path Options' set of tools:

A couple more test videos:

After Effect text test 2 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

After Effect text test 3 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.