夏

1A was when everybody had their first taste of freedom. So naturally, the arrival of Christmas meant everyone flocked to the Toronto Christmas market. I noticed a significant increase of pictures on my feed of the distillery district.

But the distillery district was one go bus too far from Brampton, so I convinced my friends to go and have a Christmas photo shoot at the home depot.

Looking back at old photo archives. Back in high school, we use to go to these recreational trails and try to make it look like we were in the middle of nowhere. That was creativity haha. No need to go to the other side of the world to get pictures, we could get the coolest images in our backyard.

Its been a while since I’ve picked up an actual camera. 

Going through some old photos during our 2B term. To celebrate the completion of our CS247 Project, Yingning and I went to the dollar store, we bought bristol board and fake flowers and had a photoshoot.

I found out that my Adobe CC subscription comes with very new brush add-ons.

It’s been three weeks since I’ve started learning After Effects and since I’ve been familiarized with the interface on a basic level, and learned a bunch of really foundational effects, I thought it’d be interesting to spend the next month solidifying my knowledge and doing a project.

I’ve always been a fan of 2NE1 back in the day and I remember this one time in which they released a music videos for one of their songs “Happy” and it had all these cool animated embellishments and I wasn’t in absolute awe. I promised myself maybe 5 years ago that one day I’d learn how to create something similar.

Fast forward to today, I’m finally fulfilling the dream of my high school self haha.

With all the tutorials I’ve gone through I realized that I now have the knowledge capacity to re-create this masterpiece and I was estatic. I spent the first couple of days going through different music videos in which I could apply the same effect to.

In the end I leaned towards the song “Gonna Get Over You” by Sara Bareilles. Gonna Get Over You is a really cute, lively dance sequence music video with lots of action and thus lots of opportunity for adding in small animations.

Sorry this is turning out to be a long post, I will get to my point. To start the project I got a note book and started jotting down the scenes of the music video (you don’t realize how many scenes there are to a video until you actively start noting them down) and thinking of animations that could fit with each scene.

I crafted some static illustrations on Photoshop and then used those to create my animations. I’m planning on writing more about my process but I forgot my notepad at home so I will just show the outcome right now to get myself excited. I will go into depth regarding how I crafted each couple of scenes in the future. But here is a sneak peek of what I’ve come up with so far!

I have 2 more scenes, but they’re too long :O so I can’t show them unfortunately. I will go over how I made each scene in separate posts though!

Hi!! Thanks ^_^

In terms of digital art and illustration, I think it’s a very cumulative process it didn’t take me until two years of learning Photoshop before I started being very comfortable using the software so I think one of the main things is to be patient.

I started off by just looking and following tutorials in order to get use to Photoshop’s interface. There’s plenty of stuff online, so you just want to watch and follow enough until you’re comfortable with where things are in Photoshop.

After that, I looked for specific artists I really like and tried to deconstruct and mimic how they created their artwork. Setting up projects of your own and following through with them is the BEST way to learn. It’s one thing to follow tutorials, but it’s another to dig into your brain and re-apply the things you learned without the tutorial playing the background. One really good indication of progress is, if you can tell yourself exactly how someone constructed their artwork, the tools they utilized and how you would approach it.

The more I mimicked and deconstructed how others created their style, the more I understood the nature of the tools, like marquees, how to use different brushes, how to use blending modes effectively and that gave me the ability to think more creatively with the tools I was using. After a while I discovered my own style of painting.

And then from there its more about learning how to draw properly, how to turn the thoughts in your head into actual artwork! Right now, I’ve become really comfortable with Photoshop but realized my actual drawing abilities are inhibiting me, so I currently trying to learn about anatomy more :)

I think the main takeaways from this is be patient, learn from tutorials but also APPLY the knowledge you’ve collected on your own projects and even when you think your art isn’t turning out the way it is, that’s okay :D

Here were some of the other artists I followed. One of my goals was to learn how to paint like them:

http://kevindart.tumblr.com/

https://www.artstation.com/izzyburton

Today I quickly went over the concept of rotobrushing as well as motion tracking. I’m trying to find ways so that I can place text and images behind objects in a scene and rotobrushing seems like one of the hackiest ways to do this, but I’m not sure if it’s the proper way. I haven’t really explored other options, but ECAbrams has a video demonstrating another method of completing the task so I’m going to check that out right after I finish writing this and posting it.

So I tracked the text I wanted to put behind the person walking first. The process went much smoother than yesterday, but I got this new error called

Basically, rotobrushing from my understanding is like masking in Photoshop but for video, I’m quite intrigued around the math that goes into the process of figuring all this out but linear algebra and graphics is a little scary and I will just worry about that once I go back to school. On school terms, I learn about art, culture and after effects.

It’s quite a tedious process and I haven’t really figured out the after effects equivalent of feathering a mask, or being more detailed in my selections or how rotoscoping sometimes tracks the object I’m trying to isolate and sometimes doesn’t.

The video I was watching explains all of this thoroughly, but I guess I was a little too overly excited and dived right into playing around with the tool. That’s good! But, I will have to go back and rewatch some of the things.

Some of the things I learned today

Camera tracking is only for clear, short shots. Camera tracking didn’t initially work on the footage I was trying to track so I had to shorten the length of the footage

Another method is to break the footage up into smaller shots and track each shot individually, I have yet to figure this out.

Rotoscoping is a cool feature

Everytime the mask you make with rotoscoping goes wonky, you need to fix it by either widening the selection or shrinking it

You need to double click on each layer so you can access the layer of the footage itself, not the composition if you are going to paint on it, create masks on it etc.

Hello today, I learned how to do 3D camera tracking with text, video and image ( I’m only going to be showing the text output). This took a lto longer than I expected it to take because the tracking point swerent showing up and it took a while to always re-analyze the video

The video footage has to be the same dimension as the composition or else you keep getting this error.

This error was really annoying because I’m horrible at interpreting instructions, I realized in the end that this error meant that my footage had to match the dimension size of the composition. Oops.

The second issue I ran into was that after putting a camera tracker on and having it analyze the video, I couldn’t select the points that were tracked. It turns out, you need to have the layer selected, the effect itself selected and if you navigate (from the top), view>Show Layer Controls. Make sure that is selected as well.

Some other interesting things I learned

3d camera tracking

making the tracked points larger

tracking images, footage and text

Now that I’ve learned this effect, the possibilities are endless. Hahahaha. The next thing to learn would be the rotoscoping brush and how to put text/images behind things. And then, there’s so many things that I can make!!

Instead of using after effects to learn traditional animation or motion graphics, I thought I’d try my luck out on special effects. My friend Kristy kindly volunteered to be in the test. I learned that there are websites out there that offer free special effect motifs like stock photos.

Things I’ve learned:

I made a Energy ball thing and I played around with the advanced lightning effect.

I learned that you can actually turn off paths and displays for objects such as Null Objects, the little anchor point (the blue outlined thing below). I had so much trouble looking for my null object because I had this feature toggled off. But now I know!!

I’m getting much more familiar with the parent-child relationship

Expressions too! Understanding what the swirly thing is now too

Keyboard shortcuts for the general transform options, S for scale and P for Position

Becoming more familiar with attaching Layers to Null Objects in order to complete something.

I learned about Adjustment layers, the effects searching panel and effects such as transform, glow, and a bunch of other ones from looking at the effects dropdown section :D

I’m happy that I’m forcing myself to do this and getting in the habit of actively learning.

Anyways, here’s the gif of my friend Kristy holding glowy balls.

Here’s Kristy holding a Blue Ball

Today we executed the hackathon we planned at the company. I spent the day organizing mini activities and what not, but after dinner I had the chance to sit down and create something I’ve always sort of wanted to create which was a parallax scene and moving components. I drew out the entire scene and that took a good 2 hours, then the animation took one hour. Even though it’s very imperfect, I’m very impressed with how I executed it. 

I learned the following things:

parent-child relationships

importing from Photoshop

the Wiggle expression

Layer naming for film and video

Motion and Gaussian blur

here was the entire scene I drew with all the layer naming. Below is the high quality image of the scene.

Here is a picture of my workspace in After effects because I like showcasing my progress.

And here is the gif version of my outcome. I haven’t rendered it (i.e. I haven’t figured out how to render it yet so I just screen recorded it for now).

I was in Copenhagen on the weekend so I had no access to a laptop, but I managed to hurry myself into another tutorial yesterday and today. I think I’m getting more and more use to the interface in After Effects, after having worked in Photoshop for so long, the interface and terminology is very similar and thus the learning curve is much lower than what I initially expected. But with that being said, there’s a lot of features and effects that I have yet to discover and become accustomed to. I’m reflecting and thinking about how I even learned Photoshop.

I think the turning point for my familiarity in Photoshop was when I spent 9 hours on one painting (it was my own designed painting, I just followed a tutorial for reference). I wonder when I’m going to break that barrier in After Effects haha.

Anyways, today I finally learned how to do the cool lettering that I so often see on dribbble. I’m definitely becoming more familiar with the trim paths tool.

I learned to how to make something on Illustrator and export it into After Effects today. This is a neat tool, I might do my name in it for learning re-enforcement.

Above is the path that the tutorial told us to trace out!

Things I’ve learned today, animating is very time consuming (or I’m just not doing it correctly haha). Today I only got through one after effects tutorial and a sort of “thinking process” video. The second video talked about how the animator planned through his thoughts when doing a motion project and it was actually quite interesting the process.

He starts off with a script to something, and then he sits down, analyzes each line of the script and sort of visualizes the motion he thinks of during each line. He writes down his thoughts, and then translates them into story board images and then animatics (animation without the fluidity). Then he goes into post production.

After the video I thought about the porject I wanted to complete and one of my ambitions was to output ten pieces of animations, but I sort of realized that there wasn’t anything for my to work with so I need to rethink this tutorial thing.

I remember in the 9th grade, the first real project we had was creating repeating motifs using marquee tools in Photoshop and I noticed that ECAbrams also has a tutorial for creating repeated tiling so I may draft something for myself up there. In addition, I think I want my final project to be creating a lyrics video. Maybe not the entire song? But enough so I spend some time agonizing and processing what I’ve been learning, I find that that is usually the most effective way for me to learn haha.

Anyways, back to my actual tutorial today, I made a squiggly line both horizontally and diagonally today. It was really interesting deconstructing how it was animated.

Things I learned today

How to make a path a zig zag

How to trim paths

loopOut() 

Hello, I’m three tutorials into my After Effects journey and I think I’m learning quite a lot. I’m just going to reflect on the three tutorials I followed since yesterday and the tools and things I learned with each one.

1.Dangling Lights 

Things I learned

Pen Tool

How to display proportional grids

adding nulls, points follow nulls, nulls follow points, trace path

how to mess around with property expressions (by pressing alt on the stopwatch)

A bunch of random scripts I have yet to understand.

Speed versus Value charts

How to attach one rotation value to another rotation value in another layer

how to make the lights dangle

2.Planet Orbit

Things I learned

Shape Layers 

Turning on and off transparency grid

Echos for trailing tails

Null objects

Making null objects parents and having other layers be children to it

Y-Rotations of the parent causes the child to rotate

having the child layer always face the camera

creating new cameras

3.Repeating Elements

keyframing

repeater tool

a bunch of properties of the repeater

easy ease and making things look more realistic

Goals for next time:

I have started yet another attempt at learning after effects properly. Now that I’m done PD, I’m going to start a personal project: creating 10 animated pieces in after effects. This will very much be a repeat of how I learned Photoshop. I am determined since there is nothing much to do at work and with all the free food, I though I might as well put my time to use and learn something that I find very rewarding.

Over the course of the next 3 months, I plan on completing a bunch of tutorials, and outputting 10 pieces using After Effects. The timeline will be the following:

February: Complete ECAbrams tutorials, Learn how to export from After Effects properly

March: For the first half of the month keep practicing tutorials and think about what to create. For the second half of the month start creating my pieces

April: create my pieces.

If I’m going to do this I’m going to do this well. Today was my second attempt here in Oslo learning how use After effects. I stopped for a while after the first attempt because I kept getting the following error

And so I searched it up on Google, and jumped to the first link that popped up which was

https://www.schoolofmotion.com/blog/cached-preview

I learned all about how After Effects handled RAM which I understand what it means now thanks to my software engineering degree. I purged my memory, I cleared my caches, and I even tried the good old opening and closing After Effects, but I was unsuccessful.