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.

Green Screen

It was suggested during the feedback session it was suggested that once the screen was filled with the stills that they should pushed off the screen to reveal the words. 
So to do this I did a green screen of my hands moving like they were moving the images.

This was my first going with filming with screen. After uploading it and having a look, I opened it up in After Effects to see how well it looked on top of the images.

Once I opened it up in After Effects, I then went on to use the pen tool. I used this to get rid of the whites on the left and right side.

The screen shot above shows what it looked like after I used the pen tool.

The next stage was to get rid of the green background. To do this I first of all selected the layer, I then went on 'effect - keying - keylight'.

On the left side, next to the screen, this then came up. Selecting the pick on the 'screen colour', I moved over to the screen and over the green part I clicked.

Doing this got rid of the green and just left the hands. The hands were slightly faint, so I needed to use the levels to adjust the brightness of this. 

This is what my hands looked like after adjusting the levels. 

After doing this, I found that it didn't work wearing my watch. So I reshot moving my hands.

This is the second reshoot that I did, with this shoot I took my watch off. This time I did it various times, and knew that I could use Streamclip to cut it to section that I wanted. Some of the hand movements were not any good due to my cardigan coming into the shot. 

Having picked the section that I wanted and cut it down using Streamclip I was then ready to import it into After Effects.

The Next Steps

After the visit from Val, we then had a week to make any changes and improvements ready for the crit on Monday. 

Once she had left, I started to make the necessary improvements. Using Firefox I was able to download some YouTube videos from their channel.

I have taken a screen shot to show the process I went through to download the videos.

I downloaded about 12 videos of 'Brighton Lights', before going on to cut the clips down to about 10 seconds. To cut the videos down I used a program called MPEG StreamClip.

To cut the clips down, I  dragged and dropped each clip into Streamclip.

Using the slider under the clip, I moved it to where I wanted it to start and pressed 'o' for the output and then pressed 'apple x' to cut the clip. When I moved the slider to where I wanted it to end I pressed 'i' for the input and then 'apple x' to cut it. To move the slider along a second I used the up and down arrows and to move along a frame I used the left and right arrows.

I created a new folder and called 10 secs and saved all the cut down clips into it. 

This is a screen shot of the clips in the folder.

After editing the clips, I then moved on to start working in After Effects. To save time, I opened up the project folder where I created my practise mock up and imported all of the edited clips that I had just been editing. Selecting the bottom layer in the time line, I held down 'alt' and from the project panel I dragged and dropped one of the just imported clips on to the selected layer. I did this until I had put in all of the edited clips. With the layers that I had left over I just turned them off using the eye image on the layer. 

Progress/ Feedback

On the 13th May, Val came back in to see how we were getting on with the program packages as well as giving us some feedback on what we need to and what we could improve on.  I showed her the practise mock that I made and explained to her what my plans were and what I still needed to do. 
This was the feedback and points that I received:

- Good concept
- Instead of images use clips from the show
- Get the Brighton Lights clips from the Latest TV YouTube channel
- Start of with the words 'Brighton Lights' on the screen and have the clips/ then stills drop on top of the words
- Once the screen is filled with the collage push the images (stills) off the screen to reveal the words
- Perhaps have the stills with borders

Text

In the brief for Brighton Lights, it didn't specify on specific colour and font so it was down to me to decide on what to use. Initially I wasn't to sure on how I wanted it to look, however I knew that I wanted to keep it clean and simple.

Looking through the fonts in Photoshop, I found these two to be clear, simple and easy to read. I had in mind of trying to resemble the Hollywood sign and found that these two fonts to look quite similar.

The first font that I looked at was 'Impact' and I tried it all in capitals and then in upper case and lower case. The three colours that I picked out to use was green, red and blue, I thought that they were simple and clean colours which would easily work.

The second font which I looked at was 'Haettenschweiler'. I did exactly the same thing as the 'Impact' font to see what it would look like. I think that I prefer this font out of the two and I think it would work well with the idea of trying to copy the Hollywood sign.

I then had a go at setting out the letters in a slight wave so that it looks like the Hollywood sign.

Practise Mock Up

After I came up with the sketches, I then went on to collect images so that I could make a practise mock up of how I want the title sequence to look. I decided to try using images before going on to using clips. 

Once I had collected the images I put them all into folders, before moving on to working After Effects.

In After Effects, I created a new composition and changed the settings so that the preset was 'HDTV 1080 25', which changed the width to 1920px and the height to 1080px.

I then imported all of the images into the project tab and was then ready to start putting the images into the timeline.

I put each image into the time and staggered the time in which they start. Using the 'p' for position, 't' for opacity and 'r' for rotation, I put in keyframes on each image. I moved the slider a long a couple of seconds and put in another set of keyframes for each image. At the first opacity keyframe on each image, I put the figure as 0 and the end keyframe as 100. The position and rotation figures varied depending on where they were situated on the screen. 

As well as putting in the position, opacity and rotation, I also went on to include a lens blur, on each one I only adjusted the 'iris radius' setting which started on 50 for the first keyframe and ended on 0.

When it came to rendering I changed the video codec to H.264 and the quality to 80. These are a couple of stills from the .mov.

Brighton Lights - Developing

From showing Val my pitch and her liking the idea that I put forward, I went on to sketching it further and coming up with a practise mock up in After Effects.

I decided to go with the idea of having the clips/ images in the background and the text on top, I started to sketch ways in which I could lay out the clips/ images. I thought that it may work well having the clips/ images layered/ scattered over each other which led me on to think about having it so that it looks like they are falling on to the screen.

I came up with a rough story boards of each clip falling with the text appearing at the end. My idea was to have each clip falling down on to the screen until they filled it, once this has happened the 'Brighton Lights' words will come across the screen.