Re: Digital Tutors - Animating An
Anastacia Iacono
1.) This is a still from the front lit footage. As you can see, the white board looks grey when the back-light is off. Having said that, the wheelhouse windows are bright white because I rigged two small LED lights on a piece of armature wire to shine through them. That way the back-light matte will make the windows semi-transparent allowing me to easily composite a character inside the cockpit later. This is something I tested out in After Effects first before making the decision to shoot it that way.
4.) Finally, because I animated the camera movement by hand, I used Warp Stabilizer in After Effects to smooth out some of the jiggling motion. Also, because I shot this on a 100mm Macro Canon L-Series lens on a Canon 5D Mark II body there was a slight bit of flicker due to the mechanical closing of the aperture for each photograph. This could have been avoided by unscrewing the lens half way to disengage the connection to the camera body. But, because the 100mm Macro is physically quite long, I was nervous about it falling off and smashing on the floor so I decided to fix the flicker in post using Auto Levels in After Effects. I also tested this prior to shooting and all I had to do was readjust the curves to regain the original look.
Several weeks ago I published a blog post entitled Animation Festivals, After Effects & Amazing CalArts Films. In the post I explored several possible reasons why my film The War Profiteers has been such a failure in the festival circuit. Ironically enough, The War Profiteers was finally selected to screen at a major film festival earlier this week. This particular festival has since asked me to password protect the film on Vimeo and replace it with a trailer. You may also have noticed that several other films from my previous blog post have been password protected. This is because those films were also selected for festival screenings. Unfortunately, I have been asked not to reveal the name of the festival my film was selected for until after the press-release has taken place. In the meantime, this post is meant to update my previous post, congratulate the filmmakers and further advertise their work by posting trailers for their films.
Jeanette Bonds, a good friend of mine from CalArts, spent the last few months as a programmer for the 2012 Platform International Animation Film Festival that took place two weeks ago at the Redcat Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Today she told me that animation film festivals actually check the online views of submissions during the selection process. Apparently, the higher the online view count, the more likely the film is to be selected. I must admit I was a bit surprised to hear this because I always thought festivals would shy away from accepting films that had premiered online out of fear that people would be less interested in seeing the film at the festival if they knew they could just watch it online. If that was ever the case, it certainly seems to have changed. For example, my friend Drew Christie had his film Song of the Spindle on Vimeo. But, when it was selected into the competition at Sundance, they simply asked him to take it down and make an Official Trailer.
Manuel Barenboim is a close friend of mine and I was amazed as I watched this film grow during my first year at CalArts. Here Be Dragons was animated using physical projections of digital and hand-drawn animations on landscapes and plants. The dinosaur like creatures were rotoscoped over real footage of animals and altered in Photoshop using a Syntique tablet. The lights that come and destroy the creatures are made of animated and colored After Effects masks and the characters are destroyed by animating displacement masks in After Effects. This film is a true hybrid between the digital and the analog.
This Tutorial is part of a series. Please read my Introduction to Hand-Drawn and Organic Looks Tutorials before proceeding. The first part of this tutorial can be found here: Creating a Puppet Made of Image Sequences in Photoshop CS6 (PART 1).
[20] Follow the corresponding directions in the screenshot below to add the frame randomizing expression to the Time_Remapping function for the rest of looping sequences in the Timeline.
This Tutorial is part 1 of a series. Please read my Introduction to Hand-Drawn and Organic Looks Tutorials before proceeding. The second part of this tutorial can be found here: Rigging a Puppet Made of Image Sequences in After Effects CS6 (PART 2).
[3] Once at the Adobe Exchange website click the blue download button in the upper left corner of the screen. On a Mac, the installer should automatically save to your downloads folder. Now install the Adobe exchange panel.
[9] When I opened the AnimDessin panel, it was attached as a new docked panel next to my buttons. But, I want it as part of my buttons, so I can close it and open it whenever I want. In order to do this, click the top tab of the AnimDessin panel and drag it over to the strip of buttons next to the Brush Presets panel.
However, I must admit that after watching the above tutorial I was originally slightly confused by step #2 on the panel. So, after a few brief messages between Stephane and I, he decided to make another tutorial and patch to help clarify this step. In the second video, he basically explains how to set up and use the Video Group Hack button by editing a short Action the first time you use the panel:
This tutorial will cover some techniques for making motion graphics look more analog like stop-motion cut outs or hand-drawn animation. This is the same motion graphics animation from before only the ball has been replaced with an image sequence, wiggler has been applied to the keyframes and then the keyframes were toggled to hold:
4. Once imported, click on the PNG Sequence in the project panel and press enter/return to rename the file to Ball_Sequence. Right click the PNG Sequence and go to Interpret Footage. Then follow the steps in the screenshot below to change the Frame Rate amount of times your sequence will loop.
5. NOTE: In step 13 of the tutorial Doing Hand-Drawn Animation Using Photoshop & After Effects CS6 (PART 2) I had you create the Composition after Importing and Interpreting your footage. Since we created the composition at the welcome screen we can skip ahead to the next step.
26. Now when we play back the animation it might look a little sporadic. This is because the ball is looping at 24fps while the hold keyframes are causing it to play back at 12fps. This can be fixed by copying and pasting the following frame randomizing expression into the Time Remap function:
27. To give the animation a fully organic look, you can also apply the Wiggler plugin to the scale keyframes and the rotation keyframes. I would also suggest converting them to hold keyframes afterwards. These are the settings I would recommend starting with for the scale and rotation properties:
28. If you did the tutorial Working With Image Sequences in Photoshop & After Effects CS6 you can import the after effects project and copy and past randomized the randomized background we made behind the bouncing ball.
This tutorial explains how to use Photoshop and After Effects CS6 to create looping image sequences like the one I used in the background of the Hand Drawn Bouncing Ball animation in my two part tutorial, Doing Hand-Drawn Animation Using Photoshop & After Effects CS6 (PART 1) & Doing Hand-Drawn Animation Using Photoshop & After Effects CS6 (PART 2).
4. Once imported, click on the PNG Sequence in the project panel and press enter/return to rename the file to Background_Sequence. Then right-click the PNG Sequence and go to Interpret Footage. Then follow the steps in the screenshot below to change the Frame Rate.
12. Once imported, click on the PNG Sequence in the project panel. To rename the file in the After Effects project press return and change the name to Hand_Drawn_Bouncing_Ball. Then right click the PNG Sequence and go to Interpret Footage. Then follow the steps in the screenshot below to change the Frame Rate.
14. Now drag your Hand_Drawn_Bouncing_Ball PNG Sequence onto the timeline of the Hand_Drawn_Bouncing_Ball composition and click the little checkerboard button to toggle the transparency of your background.
23. Click the Ram Preview button or press Command 0 on the Mac to watch your animation loop. If there are any issues in the moving of the animation you most likely have an unwanted frame somewhere and you may have to adjust the ends of the layers so the animation plays back correctly.
NOTE: I like to work in After Effects in true 24 frames per second compositions, so the full frame lengths show up. If you work at 23.976 in After Effects the lengths of the individual frames are slightly shorter than normal and I find this confusing for animation work, which is so dependent on individual frames.
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...of my background. As a freelance Digital Media Artist, I put it into practice every day. While I tutor a broad range of subjects, I am most passionate about Photoshop, Graphic Design, Digital media, and Animation. I am a firm proponent of education, believing it to be absolutely necessary for an improved quality of life,... Read more
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