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.

Draco v. Hermione Duel to the Death

Draco Malfoy Kills Hermione Granger from Edmarc Hedrick on Vimeo.

2 Advanced Lightning

1 Particle Playground

1 Shatter (on the text)

Kinetic Typography: Valediction

It took me too damn long to make this 7 second video. The song is The Foreign Exchange's "Valediction" off their 2008 album Leave It All Behind.

And I only animated it in 2D. There's no way that I could do it in 3D. Oh my gosh too hard.

Anyways, timing was also difficult too. But at least, here it is!

Brosef Stalin Was a Handsome Man

This project sucked. Going from Mocha to After Effects, I was able to get the positioning to look pretty good, but the scaling was just awful.

Help!

Paddington Bear Meets Rain

I used my previous animation for this next assignment. I wanted to add some rain to the first one, but I knew it would be too complicated. With the new techniques I learned in class, I thought I could get it this time. But even though I parented an entire row of rain to a single raindrop and then used nesting/pre-compose to organize my steady stream of rain, it still pretty looks bad.

I tried desperately to use expressions to make it looks more natural, but I don't know how it works! I kept getting errors! In any case, I probably should've made the rain come down faster. Maybe then it would've looked more real. I don't know. It was too hard.

Paddington Bear Meets Lightning

Pretty straightforward animation. I should probably have parented the umbrella to Paddington Bear, but I didn't. I'm glad I know how to do it now though and that this animation was short enough that it didn't cause me any problems!

Assignment #2 - Photoshop

This is supposed to look like Tintin (ok, whatever, I admit that I've never actually read Tintin before) running out of his comic book into a door that leads to the REAL Australia.

Ack.

Introduction: Edmarc Part Deux

My name is Edmarc Hedrick. I'm a fourth-year Radio-Television-Film major with a slew of unofficial minors including English, Journalism (photo), and Mathematics. I'm more interested in marketing & advertising though - and that's what I'll do when I graduate in May. I love technology, but I'm no techie, so I'll work in the industry, but not necessarily understand it all. Everyone says I sold out to corporate America and maybe I did. I'm not ashamed though.

In terms of visual work, I used to be pretty big into photography. I've done both digital and black & white film photography (where I developed my own film in the darkroom!). I put some of my best work onto my flickr account. But as life progressed, I had less and less time to take photos, so in my album, you'll see that I just started uploading pictures from my BlackBerry (the San Francisco pictures).

Here are the top 5 most popular photos on my flickr, some of which I expected and some of which make me wonder what in the world people are searching for on the internet.

1. QB Colt McCoy in the 09-10 football season (when the Longhorns were actually GOOD)

2. WR Jordan Shipley running onto the field with the American flag

3. The smallest puppy in the world

4. The Longhorn football team after crushing Mizzou @ Mizzou

5. Rocking the Furs

This 5th one is so bizzare. I mean, WTF, right?

Anyways, beyond photography, I've also taken Ben Bay's Computer Animation & 3D Modeling course. The work I did in that class is on this blog. I've also got some of that stuff on my youtube channel, where I also uploaded the editing sequences I worked on for my editing classes. Finally, I was kind of into graphic design as well and I did some stuff with that, but I haven't uploaded any of the pieces I've done.

Aside from all this visual communications, I enjoy learning languages, playing board games, going to live shows, eating at restaurants I've never been to before, attending swim meets, watching movies, spectating rugby matches, and listening to a hell of a lot of music.

I'm currently really loving James Blake (post-dubstep), The Foreign Exchange (electronic R&B) and Modeselektor (IDM) and I'm going to see Little Dragon (Swedish R&B) and Robyn (Swedish pop) in the near future.

I'm looking forward to looking at all of your work, guys!

-Edmarc Hedrick