Maddie and I made an animation for her History class! The presentation was about the westward expansion of the United States and Maddie did the all the writing, storyboard and voice-over for the project. We only had a week to build it and had a great time doing it together.
My friend at work, who goes by “thejbo”, is the guy who builds and maintains all the servers that host our company web application. He’s moving to Florida to work remotely and I made this motion graphic to commemorate his leaving the office. Really though, it was an excuse to learn more about After Effects and to work with my daughter Hailey. We had a great time making it!
This is a quick motion graphic I created give hipster props to Kalimar, one of our developers.
The original graphic was created in Illustrator and then brought into After Effects for the animation.
You can learn these same techniques I used by watching these two great tutorials:
This is the story of a fake “Forensic Image Analysis” effect I created to pin the blame for some recent office pranks on my colleague, Kalimar. My faked police scanning effect was accompanied by doctored-up emails of my conversations with a local Fairfax detective in which he explains that modern CCD cameras actually capture a small amount of infrared light that can be extracted with their advanced forensic photography analysis. This set up the idea that the Prankster would be unmasked by this new image scanning technology!
During our five month adventure we created over 50 thousand files. To be fair, the movie was three minutes long at 24 frames per second and at some point every frame was saved as a separate file so even if we only created each frame once that is over 4,300 files. That would have been nice to create each frame once but we created each segment multiple times. The estimate of 50 thousand is probably low. Dave and I needed to come up with a system to manage the files as well as share them between us while we worked on the movie. Dave was working on a Windows machine and I had a Mac. We each kept our own file structure that worked for us. Dave set up a google share drive that we would use to send files back and forth. Some files were as large as 150Mb. My file structure contained separate folders for potential source material such as sounds, graphics, and poster ideas. Almost every graphic element was created by us. Some of the elements such as the logos and star fields were made in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop so they have their own folders.
The original footage was kept in one folder and the frames from each segment of the movie, as well as the completed video, audio, and animation, segments in others. I see a few folders in there with example frames for problems that we were working through such as image quality, masking, color grading and test footage. An early test included beaming my daughter out of our basement.
We’re now down to the final days of post-production for the asteroid-themed space thriller (trailer) starring our daughters. In this segment, we’ll talk about the final shoot, the interactive computer screens and how we put the whole production together.
