Month: October 2015

In this weeks session i had a lot more thought about what i would actually like to create in my 1 minute short focussed around myself. Recently i feel like i have discovered myself as a bit of a money maker and slightly entrepreneurial in the fact that i want to innovate and create things in order to benefit the world and benefit myself. I feel like this can be a great topic of conversation and a good starting point in terms of thinking about the flow of my 1 minute short.

In the session itself we learnt about how to create really easy and simple vector graphics and learnt that you can infinitely scale vector graphics as the pixels update to fill the vector so it will never pixelate. i never knew this before and it has opened up a lot of doors to me before as i had seen it done but never know how to do it myself. 

I also really liked the use of the Adobe Capture app that syncs up to my Adobe cloud. I have started to use this straight away with the shapes tool to create vectors of things i would like to add into my i minute short. I really like the way that a £2 coin looks and i created a vector of that which i am hopefully going to use in a creative innovative way in my short.

I have also thought about the other sections of Digital media which i would like to incorporate such as projection mapping in terms of things that interest me. My friend has a projector and i am hopefully going to use that to create some thing in my own house that will be worthy of making the 1 minute cut.

Sadly my cat of 15 years had to be put down today, so i am also thinking of a small homage in there somewhere to Marmalade, Long live his legacy!

Firstly in the motion graphics week 5 workshop we were given a quick exercise to use simple selecting, cutting, compositing, layering, cloning etc to create a layered PSD file that can then be imported into After Effects. We can then change a multitude of things within After Effects and add effects too each separate layer to make them move using keyframing. In this example we used a cat and had to make its head follow a toy that was moving above it.

In the second talk we were given something slightly harder, which was to create shapes within After Effects and then add some effects to those shapes in many different way in order to grate a motion graphics logo. The told we used to do this were things such as the transform panel, using the stroke effect and the fill effect along side keyframing to create animation. I also used the dash pre set effect on the hexagon in the centre and key framed it to created the moving dash effect which links up to create the whole shape. I think the best thing about creating things within After Effects instead of importing from Photoshop is that you can manipulate the layers so easily and everything you add is completely non destructive.

We also got set a task to think about characteristics and ourselves we have and to remember them for the next session, I am going to write them here so that I know where they are and now everyone else will!

If I were to pick a Mr. Men character as myself I guess it would be Mr. Daydream, it’s a cliché I know, but id like to think that I am going somewhere in my life and that by having high expectations and dreaming of the top it will help me to get there. In my spare time I like to play FIFA with my housemates which I seem to do way too much, watch football with my house mates (which I also do a lot of), go to nightclubs, and do a think called matched betting which makes me spare money. I also have a job at The Swan (SU pub) in which I work for around 12 hours a week. I live on the south side of Lincoln directly on the High Street, which is around a 15-minute walk to the university.

I’d say my favourite emotion would be excitement as I think the sheer excitement of something can override every other bad emotion and fill a person with joy and happiness. I like to surround myself with people who are like-minded and generally joyful as it brings out the best in me. This year I am also trying to involve myself with the community and the media sector a lot by signing myself up for volunteering with things such as Frequency festival and the Lincolnshire ambassador. This is helping me to grow as a person and make contacts with people I wouldn’t usually have access to.

In the second week of Jon’s VFX workshops we learnt about how to use 3D tracking in a shot and exported some of our own attempts at using 3D tracking within After Effects (you can find these at the bottom of this post). In order to get a three dimensional track of the video we needed to use the track camera option in the tracking window. What this does is tracks all of the potential tracking points within the shot and then uses triangulation to create a map of points which then creates a sudo 3D track of a 2D video. These tracking points can then be applied to a null object but highlighting over certain tracking points, right clicking and clicking on one of the options depending on what job you are doing. For instance in the first video I used ‘Create Text and Camera’ As i was adding text into the video, where as on the second video i used ‘Set Ground Plane and Origin’ so that the software knew that the area that had been triangulated was the ground. With any of the options an in software camera will be made so that the graphics added can all be applied correctly.

I think with the first 3D tracking shot i did i used a good light angle to match the light diffusion in the room, i also think that the softness of the shadow was about right to match the real life elements in the shot. I do however think that the tracking could have been executed slightly better as in the video when the camera pans and moves into the third dimension the text doesn’t quite stick to the box. This may be due to me messing around with some co-ordinates and possibly changing the Z axis therefore the text wouldn’t sync with the target i had previously made.

On the editing of the second video i don’t think that the effect sold that well mainly due to my placing of the hole and the angle it was set at which just didn’t set very well but i didn’t understand why. However I do think the effect of the inner sides of the hole moving separately due to parallaxing worked very well and i really like the idea that its the little touches that really sell the effect.

Finally i learnt that VFX is different to SFX, SFX is in real life where as VFX is done in the editing suites post production, I didn’t know this before but i’m sure it will be useful to know so that i don’t sound like an idiot when talking to industry professionals!

This is the first week of VFX with Jon, in this week we learnt about the implications of 2D tracking, which situations are the best to use it and how to use it in Adobe After Effects. The premise of 2D tracking is to use tracking points using the X and Y co-ordinates in order to create visual effects within the video. The tracking point on After Effects follow a small cluster of pixels from one frame to the next. So for instance if you have a tracking point of an orange sticker on the end of a finger, it would track the cluster of orange pixels that you would have set when using the track motion option in the tracking window of After Effects. This process takes a little while due to the amount of work that is going on. Although we mainly used contrast Jon did tell us that you can track using luminance in order to find a key cluster of pixels to fix upon.

I found out from Jon that it is best to shoot with a high shutter speed to reduce motion blur, this is because the tracking markers find it hard to track on to certain specific pixels when the whole shot is blurry from motion. Jon also told us that you should always shoot with your VFX in mind, so if you have a high contrast between the foreground and the background and you want to do a sky replacement then you should get the foreground correctly focussed and then leave the sky over exposed so that it will be easier to key out in post production.

I understood the overall idea of 2D motion tracking and what it can and cannot do in terms of adding elements to a shot. For example there are many ways that could hinder an editors tracking of a shot like objects moving in front of the tracking point or the tracking point moving off the screen, if there is too much motion blur and also if the shot uses depth on the Z axis, adding a third dimension which 2D tracking will not work for.

In the second week of the digital interactions segment with Clive we learnt about augmented reality which is a technology that adds a computer generated picture or video on a persons view of the real world, creating a view that is an augmentation of their reality.

Clive taught us that with every augmented reality software the key point is that there needs to be a fixed point for the animation, this allows the software the track the video and stream the animation on to a specific tracking point. We were shown an app called Augment which is a basic version that can be used on phones, as soon as i saw it i had to get it and play around with the features (my favourite being the dancing skeleton).

In the session we learnt about the history of AR and the application it can have to many different areas such as for arts, gaming, architecture, psychology and medical treatment. I could really see the vision that Clive and others that are within the augmented reality industry have. Seeing the prospects of how versatile the application of AR can be towards any sector to make the lives of the modern human much easier.

I have a feeling that i will be wanting to use AR in my convergence task as i see great potential in the applications i can use it for.