After Effects

To summarize, Adobe After Effects is awesome. I don’t really know any other way to put it. Recently I took an After Effects class where we covered the basics of Adobe After Effects CS6. I wish the class had been more expansive, because I learned a ton! Below are a couple of projects I did for the class.

Animated Lower-Third

I created this lower-third after watching a video or two from Awesome Games Done Quick 2013, a charity event where some of the best video game players in the world play games as quickly as possible to raise money for cancer research. I thought their graphics were a little bit boring, so I created a new lower-third graphic that allows more of the game video to be displayed, while still conveying a lot of relevant information. Plus I added a scrolling info bar at the bottom with information on how to donate, since that information isn’t on their original graphic (though, in retrospect, the scrolling info bar might be a little too much).

Animated Logo

I was trying to figure out a logo to animate for this project when I found out that American Airlines had recently come out with a new logo, so I decided to animate theirs for this project. I found a vector version of their logo and brought it into After Effects. It’s a fairly simple animation, but the logo is fairly simple itself. With the first wipe across the screen it could even be used to transition from video to the logo ending!

Motion Typography

This was easily my favorite project of the semester, not just because I love the song, but because it was so fun to do (though it took a ton of work). First thing I did to create this was to pull the song into Adobe Audition and cut it down to a 30 second clip. Then I used markers in Audition to mark the start of each new line so I could see those markers in After Effects and get things timed correctly. (That was actually extremely hard with this song; the audio is clipping literally half the time and it’s hard to tell where some words start and other words end.) After that, I had to figure out an appropriate font and image choices. I found a font that was somewhat similar to the album art, and I grabbed several images from sxh.hu (a free stock photo website). I applied curves to all the photos to make them more blue (another theme grabbed from the album art), and then I got animating!

There are a few changes I would go back and make (plus expanding it out to the full song), but overall I’m pretty proud of this one!

P.S. The song I used is Madeon’s “The City.” Check out the full song or the music video.