What's Due Wednesday, 9/26

Come to class with a script for your face transformation project. This can be a quick script – maybe it's only 20 seconds – but it should be a script. It can be serious or funny. And the transformation doesn't have to be a demon face - it doesn't even have to be realistic. It just needs to be a transformatio of some sort. We'll devote the first hour of class to having you shoot the video (so bring your camera if you have one). Obviously, if you're planing on using the in-class hour to shoot the video, you should write something that can be captured on the school grounds.

Face Warp Tutorials and "Cheat Sheet"

The most confusing part of this tutorial is the section on "reverse stabilization" in the first part. I found this to be a useful resource in sorting that out:

Stabilizing and Reverse Stabilizing Footage in After Effects

MORE DETAILS FROM THE TUTORIALS

When filming, make sure the actor's face stays square in frame (this will make the tracking easier).

When tracking the footage, in the Tracker window, click "stabilize motion" in Tracker window. Make sure your track type is selected as: stabilize (this is a different setting than from the previous tracking exercise – that track type was set to "transform"). Select both Position and Rotation.

The corners of the eyes are usually good tracking points. Under "analyze," click the "play" button to analyze forward. If the track isn't doing a great job, you can go to middle of footage, reset track points, then analyze forward and analyze backward. Also, you can manually adjust points frame-by-frame (click on the frame and re-position the big square targets). Hit "Apply," then you will get your footage floating with black corners (as the edges of the tracked footage rotate through space).

To fix the black edges, you'll pre-compose the footage. To keep track of which is which, use this naming convention – call your first comp "Original Footage," and the new comp "Pre-Comp Footage."

Layer > Pre-compose > Move all attributes into new composition. This is the one you'll call "Pre-Comp Footage." A "pre-comp" is essentially a nested layer of series of layers in another composition.

This is where it starts to get confusing in the tutorial. But here's a summary.

View both comps ( "Original Footage," and "Pre-Comp Footage") stacked instead of tabbed (pull one of the tabs down until they both pop out).

Increase size of "Pre-Comp Footage" (in Composition > Composition Settings).

In your  "Original Footage,"  comp, make anchor point, position and rotation visible.

Alt-click on the stopwatch for each of those layers to see the expressions. 

Pick-whip FROM "Original Footage," TO "Pre-Comp Footage." Link the following properties.

FROM Position TO anchor point.

FROM Anchor point TO position.

Rotation goes to rotation, and AFTER you do that, add the "*-1" to the expression on "Original Footage." 

Once you've done this, you should have your footage reverse stabilized. Your subsequent adjustments for the demon face (or sunglasses, or what have you) should be don on the "Original Footage" comp. In the "Original Footage" comp, for example, you can bring in sunglasses on a new layer, and parent that layer to the "Pre-Comp Footage" layer. It will then inherit the motion values from the "Pre-Comp Footage" layer.

THE LIQUIFY FILTER

Effect > Distort > Liquify

You can keyframe the distortion percentage overall.

CHANGING COLORS 

You can do this via an adjustment layer, which has a mask attached to constrain the effect to a specific part of the footage.

Layer > New > Adjustment Layer

You can apply a number of effects to the masked area – glow, color correction, etc.

Bonus link: Transformation scene playlist

Motion Tracking "Cheat Sheet"

Here are a few pertinent points, extracted from the Motion Tracking tutorial:

1. You must define a "Null Object" - a layer in which the tracking data can be stored. Eventually, you will apply the motion information stored in the Null Object to other layers - namely, the layers of your text items.

Get the null object by going

Layer > New > Null Object

2. Set your After Effects project to "Motion Tracker View" to pull up the appropriate windows.

Window > Workspace > Motion Tracking

3. In the "Tracker" window, make sure the target for the tracking data is set to your Null object.

4. You can create a text layer by clicking on the capital "T" in the toolbar (if you'd like to manipulate the text in ways that go beyond what the character and paragraph windows give you - or even beyond what the "effects" menu will give you, like blur, warp, or bevel edges – you can always bring in text that has been manipulated in another program as a graphic).

5. To get the motion tracking info to map to your text layer, use the "pick whip" (the spiral to the right of your layer) to go from your text layer to the Null layer.

What's Due Monday (9/17)

The next project is a project where you'll be using motion tracking to either 1) stick text into an environment, so that the text has a sense of "camera shake," as if it's embedded in the scene that's being captured, or 2) the text is following some moving element in the shot (of course, you can use both approaches if you wish).

Instead of doing one shot with one title, I want you to film an entire  sentence. The sentence must be at least five words long (and think of marrying each word to a separate shot - so that the whole sequence should be at least five shots long). You'll be creating a sentence, word by word and shot by shot – but also think of the "visual sentence" you'll be building, image by image.

I want you to storyboard this project – this can just be pencil sketches on paper – mainly for compositional reasons. Because you'll be integrating text into your shots, you'll want to plan a bit beforehand - so that you have room in the shots for the text to fit, without crowding out elements of the shot, or making the shot feel unbalanced.

By Monday, you should come to class with all your shots, and a hard copy of your storyboard (which you'll turn in). Give thought to fonts you'll use, as well as where the words will be placed in frame.

Motion Tracking links and resources

A clone video Nick passed my way:

Snow Clones

Motion Tracking Tutorials:

Basic –



More advanced –

Tracking an object that moves through the frame:

http://www.surfacedstudio.com/tutorials/after-effects-motion-tracking-tutorial/

Step-bystep breakdown of motion tracking elements (for CS3, but still applicable):

http://www.cgsutra.com/adobe_after_effects_tutorials/a0008_motion_tracking/how_to_track_motion_in_after_effects_cs3.php


Madame Tutli Putli:

https://vimeo.com/17081933

Two articles on the motion tracking process used in Tutli Putli:

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/Eyes_are_the_Window_to_Madame_Tutli_Putli/

http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/node/44525

Some After Effects Performance Resources

I'm going to look into getting more RAM installed on our lab machines.

In the meantime, for better RAM preview performance, I'd recommend either changing the composition settings to a lower resolution (Composition: Composition Settings), and/or changing the RAM Preview options in the "Preview" window (by default, the preview window should be in your right column - there is a "resolution" setting there that can be tweaked.

More info on RAM previews from Adobe.

More general tips:

8 Ways To Increase Productivity and Render Speed

Dealing with various source footage:

Importing and interpreting footage items

Workflow guides for various cameras and formats

"Cloning" project cheat sheet

Trimming footage - open the layer with the footage you want to trim, bring your cursor to beginning or ending of the clip, then clip and drag in to shorten the clip.

Link:

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/aftereffects/cs/using/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103906c6dea-7e94a.html#WS3878526689cb91655866c1103906c6dea-7e70a

Or: trim it in the footage viewer. That is to say, bring the footage into a new layer, then doubleclick the layer to see the footage view. Once you see it there, you can select in and out points for that instance of the footage.

Creating the masks - use the pen tool. Once you've created a mask, you can access parameters of the mask by opening the layer. "Mask Feather" is one of the options. (there are also various layer blending modes in the mask layer).

Adding keyframes: select the stopwatch, move the playhead, then hit the keyframe control at the far left of your layer.

If you want to move one vertex of a mask, rather than the whole mask, click on the mask - then click off it, and return to the mask, clicking the specific vertex you want to click.

Stepping ahead one frame. Page up/down (fn key plus arrow key if your keyboard doesn't have "page up" and "page down")