Evaluation

 Before handing in my work, I needed to collect files together so that everything was in one folder.

These are my collected files.

Overall I found this project went quite well. Although I have found it challenging in places, I have also learnt a lot and also gained much more confidence in using After Effects then I had previously. The time scale for this project has been long, but found that time has gone really quick. Having both the idents and title sequences working a long side each other has been quite a challenge; trying to get the balance of both has been quite hard and I think it’s a reason as to why I think that time felt as though it went quick.

I’m pleased with how my work ended up, although I feel there are still some things, which I could to do to make it better. Perhaps if I had scheduled my time better, I could have left myself enough that I could have used it to make any changes or tweaks that needed doing. 

Finished Idents

These are some stills from the five idents that I came up with:

These are the 10 second idents.

These are the stills from the 5 second idents:

I made one of the 5 second idents with text and then one without. It was until I had rendered them both out and handed them in I realised that I hadn't put wallpaper in the background, which was annoying. 

Finished Title Sequence

This is what my finished title sequence looks like, I couldn't get the video to upload so I have some stills of it instead:

I'm fairly happy with the outcome of the title sequence, however near the end it ended up being a bit jumpy and didn't flow as well as I would have liked. Sadly I ran out of time and couldn't sort this out which is a shame. 

Rendering

After I had finished I then went on to render everything.

For each of the projects that I rendered I did exactly the same thing. I changed the video codec to H.264 and the quality down to 80. The rendering took quite a bit of time to do.

Changes

Based on the feedback that I received yesterday I have been making the necessary changes ready for tomorrow. The first thing that I did was add the borders onto all of the clips.

I opened each of the clips in Photoshop. 

Then referring back to the layer style, I clicked on the border image and it then appeared on the clips.

Finally I exported the clips by going on 'file - export- render video'

I gave the file a name and then clicked render. The rendering process of each clip took quite a bit of time.

After rendering all of the clips, I then imported all of the clips into After Effects. Using the 'alt' key I replaced the original clips with the new ones with borders. Luckily by doing this I didn't need to change/ add any keyframes which I had before replacing the clips. From doing this it lead onto me making another change which was mentioned in the crit session. It was suggested that all the clips should be opaque from the beginning and not transparent, so once I had put in all the clips I then went on to do this.

On each clip I highlighted the first opacity keyframe and changed the amount to 100%.

Another change that I made was to the text. Val said about giving it some depth, so in Photoshop I experimented with the drop shadow, inner shadow and the bevel and emboss. I played around with the amounts until I found one which looked right. This is what I came up with:

Finally I made some small tweaks, like sorting out the music, the song which was emailed to me was 4 minutes so I needed to cut that down so that it was the same length as my sequence. I also added the new text in, as well as speeding up the hands slightly which meant I needed to spend a little making the hand and photo adjustments. 

Crit/ Feedback with Val

This morning Val came back to give us feedback on our title sequences. These are some stills from my title sequence:

I received some good feedback with some helpful points on what changes I could make. These are the points that I was given:

- like the improvements

- add some depth to the text

- like the font choice

- make al the clips opaque and not transparent

- at the end on the zoom do it so that it goes to the black

- add a border to the clips so that its the same as the stills

- speed up the clips of the hands

I've now got until Wednesday to make the necessary changes.

Final Touches

When talking to Andrew he suggested putting borders on the stills. In Photoshop he showed how to do this with drop shadows and strokes.

This is what the border looks like on one of the stills.

The border was saved as a layer style, which meant it was a quick process to add the border on to all of the images.

I saved all the images in a folder and went back in to After Effects to change all the stills to the new stills with borders. Using the 'alt' key meant it didn't take very long.

Text

I decided to change the way the text was set out as the Hollywood sign type text didn't really work with what has been suggested. During the last feedback session it was suggested having the text on the screen at the beginning. I stuck with the font choice, Haettenschweiler, but decided to go with a slightly darker shade of red.

On experimenting in Photoshop, I decided to go with using an upper arc for the word 'Brighton'. I found that the words stood out better and looked more eye-catching then if they were both straight.

Lower Thirds

I wasn't to sure about what to do for the lower thirds, so I took the text from the title sequence and used that with rectangle bar. I put it together in Photoshop, I dropped the opacity of the bar which is the same colour of the text and then placed the text on top.

In After Effects I made it so that it faded on to the screen and the faded off the screen.

Moving My Hands in After Effects

After doing the adjustments to the hands layer, I was then ready to move them along with the pictures. Moving each image in line with the movement of my hands was quite a fiddly process which took quite a bit of time. These screen shots shows what I did, I did this for each image that's on the screen.

To help me work on each image I used the solo button on the layer I was working on, which was the hand and an image. I moved the slider a long so that the hand was just over the image, I then added a position keyframe on the image layer.

After I did that I then moved the slider a long a few more frames until the hand was off the picture. Then, selecting the image layer I moved it so that it was back underneath the hand - by moving the image it added another keyframe.

Once I moved that image, I went back to where I had originally started and then pressed the solo on the image which was next to the one I had just been working on. On the new image I put a position keyframe and did exactly the same thing as I did with the previous image.

I did this process to all of the images on the screen until they will pushed to the edge and there was only blank space in the middle of the screen.