Monday 21 May 2012

Handwritten Effect

My brother is on the Performance & Media course and asked me to make a handwritten effect for the title of his 2nd year film 'Losing Faith'
I made this for him in After Effects. The technique is pretty simple to do. I found a quick tutorial on YouTube and added a ripple/dissolve effect at the end, and this is the result ... the background is a still from the shot:



There is a problem with this technique though! If you're lazy with it it won't look so seamless as you might want. If you look carefully at the video below you will see that as the letters are being written you can see part of the stroke of the letter. For example, the "F" or the "t" in "Faith," as the stroke follows the letter you can see part of the dash ... which is not good! I saw this technique used on an advert the other day, I can't remember which one it was but I remember thinking that it looked lazy because they didn't bother try and fix this problem:


The way I fixed it was pretty quick and easy. I made a new precomp and literally just masked over the stroked areas I didn't want to be shown and animated the masks. It didn't take that long to fix and in my opinion the result is a lot nicer:

Very VERY Old Animation

I was going through my Foundation portfolio the other day and I found my old flip book animation from my Art Foundation course back in 2008 (wow I feel old!)
I thought it was pretty hilarious how bad it was and thought I had to put it together and run it on the computer to see how it looked ... it's pretty bad :P

I thought I'd share it with the world for nostalgia. Does anyone remember their first animations?

p.s. this does NOT represent my animation skills now! 

Wednesday 9 May 2012

I be modelling a Bee

I had a job interview for a company up in North Wales who specialise in 3D visual learning, so I thought I'd better practice doing more modelling just in case I get the job. I've started making this bee as an organic thing to model. (I've modelled a train already, just need to post on here as well)

I think the company like working low poly so I thought I'd better give that a go cos I like working high poly :) 1,682 polys is low so far, right? Have just given it some smoothing groups so it doesn't look so sharp.
I'm pretty happy with it so far but will keep posting to see how it goes: