Fish Fridays: 2-Point Tracking

As I need to work more on tracking within after effects, I was shown by Pete how to do 2-Point tracking of some footage he had shot, as well as using an image he created.

In this we tracked two contrasting areas on the footage and added the tracking data to a null.

Once this was done, we then added the fish into the comp, making it a child of the null.

But with the fish just being left like this, it didnt look that convincing, so I added a Linear burn effect so that it looks more like it belongs on the building.

I also added some text to the tracker so that it says “fish fridays” on the wall of the building.

I have decided to change it a bit, by adding a pallet to the wall instead of a fish, since it is the arts academy building.

I have added a few different things this time, not just an image on the front of the building.

 

Personal Projects: Galaxy Ball Title Screen

Today I am making a Galactic Ball Title Screen. I have started off by importing the right files into after effects to make this composition. The first effect that I have added is Turbulent Displace to some of the light …

Side Project: Animating Lines in After Effects

This project involved making an image in illustrator, and importing it into after effects.

Due to the image being a vector, I am able to scale and change the size as much as I wanted without it being distorted or lose its quality.

this is the image imported into after effects.

What we needed to do was to add a trim lines to the image.

Then when we changed the settings, this meant that either the lines would all simultaneously be drawn, or individually.

I chose to do the individual line drawing.

 

 

Personal Project: Jessie Swimming – VFX Tracking

I have decided to try and practice more VFX skills, today I followed a tutorial on how to add a motion track to a piece of moving footage.

I used a video of my two dogs swimming.

The footage is quite low quality and is shaky so it was difficult to get the motion tracker to work properly, as it would keep moving onto my dog on the left rather than stay on Jessie.

I have cut the footage so that it mainly focuses on Jessie rather than Woody to see if that helped with the tracking error, and it did.

I then added a Halo to the motion that I tracked, and also added a glow around the outside of the halo.

Screenshot of motion tracking of wings

I have started to add a motion track to Jessies back so that I can also add a pair of wings.

The tracking seems to be far too unrealistic and jitters around the screen constantly, even when I have tweaked the motion points.

So I think I am going to take out the wings as they seem to spoil the effect.

I think that this maybe due to the low quality of the footage, how it constantly moves around and the camera isnt that good.

VFX Kitten Project: Premier Pro and After Effects

I have now rendered BB-8 out as a png sequence and have edited this within Premier pro. I have then added him onto a layer onto top of the kitten video and added some sound effects to try and make it seem more realistic.

The next thing to do is to add some more effects within after effects, including shadows.

 Once I had edited the videos within Premier Pro, I moved the files into After Effects and added a drop shadow to the BB-8 Layer. I then moved it to behind him so that it appears as when he moves, the shadow follows him.

On another layer, I added another BB-8 copy, this I then added a blending layer mode onto it, changing the lighting on the model to match that of the video.

Once those were done, I have then also added a reflection of BB-8 that I have set with keyframes to follow BB-8 while he moves around. The reflection was added as the kittens in the video have a slight reflection themselves on the flooring.

I have added another video below for this video.