Title Sequence

During this week we learnt the basics of After Effects and became familiar with the composition and layer workflow. We looked at different title sequences and how they were made, specifically the title sequence from one of the original James Bond Films.

I first created a simple sphere in a separate composition.

I then separated the animation into different sections that would appear and disappear based on the original animation, I used the hue/saturation to manipulate the colour of the circle composition and then I duplicated it multiple times and aligned them to the height of the row.

I did this for the section that had 3, 2, and 1 rows of spheres. Then I shifted these rows so that they would match, the spheres weren’t moving but they seemed like they were due to them hiding and unhiding.

I chose to do this method as in the original animation it seems like it is an animation from different lights turning on and off randomly meanwhile changing colours. It didn’t look like there was one sphere jumping around.

I used the same technique for the row that had 2 spheres stuck together moving from side to side and changing colour in a new composition.

I then added a shadow effect with a bright color which created this glow effect and added more interest to the spheres. I also created this composition where everything will be added to create the final animation with all of the layers being combined here.

Week 4
This time around we began to manipulate the footage from the studio that we had gathered, we used After Effects Keylight effect to key out the green screen and use it to create black shadows of ourselves. We animated certain shapes using the techniques we learnt in the past and used these to create a sort of title sequence inspired on James Bond.

Here we combined multiple different spheres in different ways to create different styles of title sequences. These helped us get used to the Keylight effect by simply repeating it over and over again with different levels of complexity.

Week 5 Here I changed the point of origin from the graphic to the place I want the object to track from. Then  I used the tracker window to select a specific point on the footage where I could track the graphic.  After  Effects automatically tracked the point and where it moved across the video. This allowed me to select the graphic and make it move with the object to create the effect that it was moving with the camera.

We then worked on creating a blur effect over a face, this is an effect that can be used to conceal someone’s identity over footage or hide specific information such as numbered plates from cars. We used the Mosaic Effect to create the blur over the tracked mask. This meant that the mosaic effect was able to be tracked across the face and follow it as it moved. This was a very simple effect but a very useful one as well.

For this shot, we used the tracker again but we created many points from the footage and then selected the points that we wanted to use as a reference for the text to track onto. This was useful at the time of creating the effect that the text was on the grave and the roof and it can be used to track certain imagery or 3D objects onto areas of video. In this shot, we used the content-aware fill to create a mask that was tracked onto the footage. We then used the mask as a reference to create a content-aware fill which uses the surrounding area to create a similar texture seamlessly. This helped us remove a sign that was on the wall in a way that was very hard to notice.

This is a very simple thing to do if the wall is basic and nothing passes in front of it. If it is a piece of wall with a car passing in front or a person then this wouldn’t be as automatic and it would be more of the roto paint area instead of a simple effect like this one.

In this video, we used the track window again to use the movement of the first logo as a reference for the tracking before we transferred the same movement to another section of the box and tracked the Adidas logo onto it.

I then added a hue saturation effect and changed the opacity of the image, the hue saturation helped me give this slightly brown-black colour instead of the pure black from the original image as well as the opacity helped some of the details from the creased box to come through the logo and help create the effect that the logo was on the box.

Here we learnt how to use 3D in After Effects to create some interesting effects and videos. This is something that is very commonly used in compositing and VFX and I am hoping to make use of it in the future as I found it very useful yet somewhat complicated to get used to I will definitely need to practice with it to get better at using it but I have a good base set up now and it will help me learn more complicated things in the future.

Here we are rendering some AOVs in Maya to take into After Effects. Rendering the AOVs can be tedious and might seem useless at first yet it helps give us VFX artists a tremendous amount of control in the post-processing stage and can help fix mistakes that would otherwise need a rerender which could waste a lot of hours or even days.

Here you can see how we used the Extractor to expose the render layers / AOVs and the process of turning the original materials into different ones by using the crypto mattes to change the colour of the bottle and pot.

Here you can see another use of render layers and how they can be combined to create a more typical render and post-process pipeline that is common in the VFX industry. In this case, they have been used to take control over the Ambient Occlusion and the Z-depth has been used to add blur and depth of field to the background as well as some fog. The specular also helped us have some control over the reflections in the post process and I was able to dial them down in the final render.

Here is the process of creating different fire and smoke simulations, the first is a basic fire simulation in a 2D space the second is the same but in a 3D space. The third starts to get more complicated as we changed the emitter for a plane with a dotted texture which only emits the fire from the white sections.  Creating a pretty cool effect, the final simulation mixes the physics system and the fire simulations to make bullets that are lit up in flames.Here is the storyboard for my James Bond-inspired title sequence, not all of these shots ended up in the final render yet a lot of them were used and some were changed slightly or used for inspiration in other new shots.

I wanted to combine the feeling of Manhattan which was the first title sequence I saw in this module and I wanted to combine it with the crazy abstract feeling from the Severance. I think it ended up pretty well, I used Maya and its bullet and physics systems to create the head explosion from the bust which I ended up really enjoying.