After Effects

Falling

For this project I was very excited to make something with after effects because I have learned a little bit on youtube before I took this class, but I was very excited to learn more during our demo. When you went over the dynamic link it was a game changer, I was finally able to edit the way I had been looking for. I wasn’t editing my video to my audio, but instead I could edit my audio to the video and then I started doing both. Doing this really made my video sound and look the way I envisioned. I am a big fan of using all my own footage for film and art. I'm a film major as well as an art major so I have a lot of video background and past projects that I wanted to rework and add effects to in the software. I am currently in a beginning animating class and I wanted to composite and rework some of the stuff I've done in there and bring it into this class. I have a bunch of five second clips from that class that I wanted to make longer, and feel cohesive in a way. I decided that the best way to do that was adding light sources, as well as overlaying and key-framing opacity to make a short clip seem longer with more action. I also am really obsessed with over-saturation and interesting color pallets. I made these color changes throughout the one minute film based on the audio track that I created. In a way I was trying to make the color changes drive home the idea that this film is almost an experimental way to tell a story through a visual medium, instead of reading it, or having someone spell it out with words. My brother wrote me a poem and I decided I wanted to loosely base this off of that poem. Originally I made a four minute film that was heavily based on the poem and dealing with the plot line. I had a lot more animation

s and stuff like that because I had more time to work with, however I ended up taking the strongest parts from that and narrowing it all down to one minute which was very challenging for me to do. I think it's because working with a shorter amount of time is hard for me because I like to really develop a rising action, climax and falling action.

I used the curves effect a lot to make each clip look crisp and having the color levels be how I wanted them to look. I also did a lot of color correcting using the toner effect, as well as pedestal gain and gamma/alpha effect as well. I also discovered the solar flares as well as the generate effect in general. I was finally able to use a lot of the effects and make something deliberately instead of just making an animation by just messing around with the effects and not knowing how to really utilize them in a dynamic way if that makes sense.

For the soundtrack I meshed a whole bunch of sounds/songs together and I discovered the remix effect in Audition and I was quickly obsessed and stayed up all night making songs out of tiny clips of audio that I loved into full remixed songs. I focused heavily on making the audio not overpower the visuals because I feel like if I had too much audio with so much visual it would be too much for the viewer and would come across as maybe too chaotic.