Jack was able to create the introduction to our music video. We decided to establish the scene with a clever earth zoom effect, this would hopefully inform the audience what will happen and what to expect from the video. The spinning and colour changes would hopefully inform the audience that this is a trippy and strange world they are diving into. Jack was able to create this using after effects.
For our music video jack was to created a zoom effect that made it seem as if the camera was coming from out of space onto my house, the scene where our movie starts.
jack was able to create this by flowing a tutorial on http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/earth_zoom/
This was for a zoom from Earth to space, but just quite simply jack reversed the scale so the 'camera' starts from space and then zooms in. jack came into a bit of trouble with the scale when the zoom went really slowly, and then ridiculously fast due to the scale being linear. To fix this he made the scale "exponential" which makes it similar to the way a camera would zoom.
To start with we made a new composition lasting 5 seconds at 29.97 frames a second. Jack then got 8 printscreens from Google earth at varying heights, and crop out the bit I needed in each image in photoshop.
Jack had to parent these images together so that they would go into each other seamlessly and feather around the layers to make it blend in even more. After he had parented the layers to each other, the corners of each image within the other could be seen. To reduce the notice ability of this he placed an elliptical mask on each on of the images, feathered it 250 and on the mask expansion factor put it to -250. Jack then added a 180 degree rotation to a null object to give it a more interesting/ trippy and effective effect. He made the key points "easy-ease" which stops the rotation starting and stopping harshly, it will 'ease' it in and 'ease' it out.
After doing this Jack created a new solid and added fractal noise to it in order to create the stars. Jack clicked on transform and altered the scale so it looked more like a static tv, brought the contrast up and the brightness down. I then moved the layer below all the others so they over lapped it and parented it to layer 1 so everything was linked. This was decided by the group and jack was able to add this in after the discussing.
The next thing we wanted to create was a camera wobble as it was zooming through the air. We thought that this would be more effective and show the audience speed and if they are on a ride. And to do this jack put the Earth Zoom Composition and placed it in a new composition. After this he added a slider control so he could animate the wobble. Jack then input some code by Alt+clicking on the stop watch: wiggle(10,(parent to the slider control)).
A problem arises when you make this shake, a black fringe appears on some of the sides because to make the wobble effect the computer offsets the image from the viewers box. To overcome this jack added the motion tile preset, turned on mirror edges and set the x and y factors to 120.
After this he created a new layer and added fractal noise to create clouds. Jack even experimented with the clouds to make shapes and it more 3D.
By turning the fractal type to dynamic it gives it a more cloudy effect. By increasing the contrast and decreasing the brightness it makes it look even better and less oddly shaped. Change the transfer mode to screen so the black is removed and the clouds overlay the layers below. Now in the tutorial it says to find a hole in the clouds for the camera to zoom through but as a group we thought a better way to do it would be by having the cloud fade and zoom towards the camera and then fade and zoom past the camera. This gives the effect that the camera is actually travelling through 3D clouds (the clouds thinning out as they decrease in density as the camera is travelling through it), rather than travelling through a 2D hole. I did this effect 2 or 3 times and we think it works quite well and makes the effect more interesting. Jack then feathered again and reduced the expansion so it didn't look square and also changed the shape of the mask to give it a more random look. Also the clouds need to have an exponential scale so they do not change like a linear scale would. Jack then parented the clouds to the rotation so they rotate with the landscape.
He tried to make our name "A Film Production Company" come up in clouds, I got quite far with this but encountered a problem with the name coming up too fast. I tried to solve this by changing the scale, but for some reason it still came up too fast even with an exponential scale. This just made it look terrible so got rid of it, but Jack managed to take some printscreens which you can see below. We then scraped the idea as it made the film look tacky and unprofessional for our genre of film. instead we kept the clouds natural but managed to change the colour of some of them as the earth rotated. The earth has an oval shape to it and this is quite hard to get rid of due to the imaging from Google earth. We have to keep this oval shape but we don’t think it damage our film too badly .over all i am please with the effect and I’m sure jack is proud of this too.
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