Assignment #4

I didn't know that I had a twin... from Marcy Elliott on Vimeo.

This project was fun; I really enjoyed it, and every time I show this video to someone (who is not in our visual effects class), they freak out and ask me how I did it. So I will explain that now. I started out by shooting 2 separate sets of footage using iMovie and the built-in camera on my macbook. Then I brought the footage into final cut pro, and cut each clip down to the same size. After cutting the footage, I imported both clips into after effects. I made sure to line-up the videos, and then I placed a mask over the top video layer. The mask starts out cutting the entire left side of the frame (from the edge of the door out). Then, as the twin Marcy leaves, I animated the mask to follow her offscreen. The first time I played this back, I noticed that the line of the mask followed me offscreen, so I keyframed the mask feather to increase as the mask moves. That's all folks!

Assignment #3

Rollercaster fun from Marcy Elliott on Vimeo.

Here is my After Effects project that demonstrates the effects of time. I like rollercoasters a lot, so I decided to show how a rollercoaster loop interacts with space in time. Using Photoshop, I cut a mask of this coaster track out of a picture that I found online. That was probably what took the longest- i had to adjust the mask in between every track...heh. Then I found the actual coaster cars in another picture from google, and I cut that out with a mask in photoshop as well. Then I found the starry sky background and applied a few hue/saturation adjustments, and a glowing effect. I brought all of the items into After Effects, and put them all together. To keep the rollercoaster cars together I used the parenting function to link them, and molded their path along the track. I had to use some extra masks for certain parts of the rollercoaster track (so that the cars would pass behind them). After I defined the motion of the cars, I used the speed graph to adjust their rate of motion. Yay, I think that's it! Enjoy!

Assignment #2

Lost City

Lost City from Marcy Elliott on Vimeo.

This one took a really long time. I sketched the mermaid, castle, and bubble, and then scanned them into my computer. Before I took them into After Effects, I edited each picture in Photoshop. The actual animating didnt take nearly as long as I thought it would. I had fun using the puppet pin tool on the mermaid. I also applied the wiggler to each bubble after I determined their individual motions. And finally, I added motion blur to everything after I was done. Yay!

Assignment 1

Eye of the Dragon

In this picture, I combined 5 separate photos/drawings. The Dragon's head is actually a pencil drawing that I made several years ago. I applied masks to every photo/drawing using the magnetic lasso tool to define their individual shapes. I created a group for each photo/drawing, so that I could organize my adjustments and filters (once the group was formed, I applied each mask to it's respective group). The adjustments I used on various layers included brightness/contrast, hue/saturation, levels, vibrance, exposure, and curves. I also used the Unsharp Mask filter multiple times. Some of the other tools I used were the smudge and burn tools. After everything was finished I went back to the mask tab and adjusted the mask edges so that they were smooth and feathered; I wanted the entire composition to blend. That's pretty much it. :)