Week 3: Final

So before my final render, I added several things:

• Rain particle simulation
• Sky background
• Animated flowers (incredibly long and difficult sequence with a lot of layers and precompositions)
• Added 3D camera and moved it around
• Added music
• Animated balloons (this took the most. I wish I knew how to do expressions but I don't. It probably would've made it easier. Instead, I animated each one by itself.)

Didn't know how to do an ending, so I just ended it abruptly :\ I didn't have time to figure out how to fade out audio and video. Probably should've done it on Final Cut Pro but it took two hours to render and ran out of time :S

It was fun! Happy with the result! One glaring error I wish I could've fixed though.

Final - Final

"Life Cycle"

Final - Week 2

So, I've made my flowers and fences out of basic shapes. I used masks to animate fences, too. I've inserted a 2D plane for my grass. I had to offset the image and clone stamp the seams out so that I can place it into AE several times.

I've laid most of it out in 3D space now and it took me a little longer than I originally planned. I'm a little behind.

I have a new idea for animation though. I'm going to try use masks in order to animate the flowers, to make it appear as if they're growing from the ground. Shouldn't be too hard. But then I want to animate the flower petals so that they turn into balloons. This sounds a little more difficult.

I might just get rid of the fireworks all together. Need to add the Sky background pretty quickly... No keyframed camera movements yet. Yikes!

Final - Week 1

For my final project, I plan to use lighting, basic shapes, 3D camera, basic animations, masks, and perhaps particles to create a stylized, fantastical, and perhaps cartoonish world. Maybe more things. Not sure exactly yet.

I like the idea of using basic shapes to create images. So most of the images that I will be creating for my project will be made up of these basic shapes.

Ultimately, I want to use a 3D camera to move through this world that I create. So there will be a lot of layers and a lot of basic animations for these shapes.

I have a few ideas, but I'm not quite sure how I'll go about doing the animations at this point.

First, I'd like to move a camera through a field of 2D flowers as if a person were running through this field. And as he "runs" through this field, I'd like the flower petals to blow around him. I might need to use expressions for this to animate each flower petal (then just copy and paste these around). I'd also like to use rectangles to form a sort of enclosure around some flowers. And use masks to "animate" the fence, as if it were rising from the ground.

Finally, I eventually want 2D balloons to rise and maybe fireworks to come up.

This seems a little complicated, but I mostly just want a lot of dramatic 3D camera movements to create a whimsical little animation. Not sure if this will be possible to do by deadline.

Breakdown of work:

Week 1: Begin creating individual objects (flowers, balloons). I figure I will have to use some masking to apply textures onto my flowers. Also my flowers will have to be oriented in 3D space. Gotta figure this out. Insert backgrounds of some kind? Field/Sky.

Week 2: Animation. (Omit if flowers take too long). Animate flower petals in 3D and apply 3D camera. Animate fences. Insert backgrounds of some kind? Field/Sky.

Week 3: Animate 2D balloons and create some fireworks.

Week 4: Polish.

Hope that I can do this successfully. Hmmm...

Planet Britney!

Planet Britney from Edmarc Hedrick on Vimeo.

Lol, I have no idea how these masks/mattes work. It's more complicated than I thought.

So what I have is 4 layers:

1) Solid black. Placed a circular mask on it and animated it along a path to emulate looking through a telescope. Tried to feather it -- maybe I should've done more of that.
2) Stars - turned this layer off so that the others below would project through it.
3) Red/white solid - used luma matte to give the stars its white and red colors.
4) Britney Spears Music Video - used luminance matte and fractal noise to give it that gassy look, and placed a circular mask on it so that it would look like the "planet" that I was searching for.

Bah. No avail.

Ben! At The Disco

Took footage of Ben dancing, matted out the sides of the frame, keyed the green out, then placed a photo of a nightclub behind him.

Added a red spotlight and a camera, put some brostep in the background and voila!

Song:
Skrillex - "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites"

Disney Art Gallery

Simple vanishing point. Camera tracking down the hall (had problems with the seams). And an ambient blue light that took away the nasty yellow fluorescent lighting present in the original picture.