Today we had the after effects guru Angie Taylor in to give us a very insightful tutorial on Adobe photoshop, bridge and after effects itself. Here are some notes taken from the tutorial followed by my discussion I had with her in regards to the current MTV / D & AD Awards Brief 2008(see next post):
- Storyboarding - vital for anything with a storyline (complex or not) which I am already aware of. Angie showed us some tips on storyboarding and her style for visually representing things like zoom, text scrolling etc (SEE SKETCHBOOK FOR MORE).
- Creating Animatics is a really nice way to get a rough overall perspective of the story you will be creating. This was done in the first year and I have worked upon this technique ever since.
- Apparantly there is a lack of storyboard artists in the UK, this is something that I have considered for a while and would be great to have such a major role where communicating with all areas of production is vital.
- For royalty free / public domain imagery visit Angie's Favourites below:
- Adobe Bridge is a good tool for making PDF Presentations (showreels).
-Combing Adobe Bridge & Photoshop has a feature where you can merge photos together - see sketchbook.
- Vanishing point tool on Photoshop allows you to make perspectives more clearer and can make an image more 3D for importing into 3D Studio Max or After Effects.
-Healing tool is an excellent tool when used with clone stamp tool in Adobe Photoshop. This is how airbrushing is done - just look at an FHM cover model. Align Tool and non-align feature is also excellent for being more or less precise...
- Left and Right Brackett buttons = shortcut for paintbrush size in Photoshop.
- Apple + J - copies the selected area on photoshop and places it onto another layer.
- Overlay Tool is excellent for matte effects in Photoshop.
- Using RGB channels is a good way to edit and manipulate imagery.
- When sketching, use blue for shading as this can be altered easily when scanned into Photoshop using the RGB channels and de-selecting blue.
- The latest feature in After Effects CS3 is the Puppet tool, this tool is superb for real time animation. It allows you to select areas of an image and animate them without the lengthy process of keyframe animation. This is also a superb way to animate my MTV logo on the vinyl and has opened up a whole world of possibilites for other animations and effects e.g. virus spreading throughout movie.
- After Effects CS3The motion sketch tools allows you to "real -time" animate your components in the composition.
- Expressions are always a good way to animate, loads of links online for various expression in After Effects.
- When animating using the puppet tool over keyframed layers (traditional animation method) you will see parts of the image will detach. To solve this increase the expansion on mesh feature.
- Puppet tool is great for facial expression animation.
No comments:
Post a Comment