My loop
Here is my finished loop
My loop statement
My loop project
For the two other projects we’ve done, ident and text, I came up with ideas straight away, but when it came to doing a loop I was stuck for ideas for a while. Then I saw a smudge that looked like a footprint and I came up with the idea of moving footprints.
I started out taking both pictures and filming footsteps in neon light moving forward so that I would have enough footage to work with. When I came to the editing room though the photos I wanted to use wasn’t good enough quality so I had to re-think. My teacher Raef then gave me the idea to cut out the footprint with best quality and make an animation out of it and that’s what I did.
I started out making the footsteps drag next to each other but then got a comment that when you walk you can’t actually see both footsteps at the same time but instead one appears as the other disappears. I started editing the footsteps in After effects and making them disappear took a lot more editing time then I thought but in the end I got it done for the crit.
At the crit I didn’t get the best feedback. The footsteps moved a bit to slow with the music and I was told to try to do it in Premiere or Flash instead. This felt like I had to redo the whole thing but I wasn’t completely happy with it so I tried it in Premiere. While editing in Premiere I got the feet to move faster and move with the music better. I also made several footprint move all over the screen at the same time instead of just one pair moving across the screen.
After all the changes and work I did I am very happy with the result. The problem I found in Premiere was that the footsteps didn’t end the same way the began and as it’s a loop it has to start and end the same way. I solved this by adding one second of black colour at the beginning and end so that the loop starts off black and ends black. Though this created another problem. At the end, before the black comes in, the footprint stops and then switches to black, something you didn’t notice before I added the black. I tried figuring out a solution but after playing it several times I decided to leave it. I liked the idea of the footprints going from moving fast to stopping for a second and then starting again. It looks almost as if they are stopping with the music too which I liked.
One other thing I would have liked to change is that the footprints are moving from the top, the bottom and the right hand corner. I would have liked to add one more set of footprints coming from the left side corner but as there are only three lines of video in Premiere I thought this couldn’t be possible and even if it is I felt I didn’t have the time to learn how to add a fourth sequence.
Apart from that I’m happy with my loop and I’m glad I kept on changing it because I can now be proud of what I have done.
My text project without sound
This is the first version of my text project. The version I did in Aftereffects before I added the sound. As soon as I can upload my final project you will be able to see the difference in the quality.
My text project statement
My text project
I changed my project to making letters on squares in Photoshop and then use these letters to create words that was moving in Aftereffects. I decided that the letters would all lie in a pile and from there form words. Technique wise I didn’t know how to turn the letters in to a string so instead I made the letters disappear in the end followed by a picture with the text “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt” on it. While I was making the letters disappear I realised that I could form a word at the very end so the two letters that disappears last are the letters m and e which forms the word me. So far along in the project I had not yet decided on what type of audio I wanted to use but my thought was on some kind of calm and slow music without lyrics.
When the critique came up, as I was watching the others students work, I was realising how the picture at the end of my project didn’t fit in there. And that was also the feedback I got once it was my turn to be critiqued. I also got a comment about how the letters in a pile represented my brain and that the words were coming out of my brain which was a comment I like because that is how I formed the words in the first place, from my brain.
As I didn’t have any sound I got the comment that I should do sounds of the letters moving instead of using music and I liked that idea so that’s what I did in the end.
What I struggled with in this project was mostly technical. I think working in Aftereffects taught me a lot and I’m glad I can now manage that program and I didn’t struggle too much with it. The only thing I did have some trouble with was the 3D effects but that worked out in the end with the letters fading away even though that wasn’t my first effects choice. Where I struggled most was when I was going to add the sound in Premier. Premier kept crashing and once I thought I was finished and watched the project I realised that what had been fitting in the screen on Aftereffects wasn’t fitting the screen in Premier so many of the words ended up outside the screen. To fix this I changed the format to widescreen which did solve the problem but this also made the quality of the letters a lot worse. But I didn’t know how to fix that so I left it like it was
The last problem that I had was when I added audio. My first thought was that a sound would appear every time a letter came out of the pile to form a word but it was very hard to synchronise each letter with a sound so instead I had to put one sound per word. Same problem occurred when the letters were dissolving, it was very hard to synchronise the sound with every letter that disappeared so instead I put a sound in with a few letters at a time. At the end I wanted a little twist to the sound so it wouldn’t all be the same and that’s why it’s a different sound at the end.
All together I’m happy and pleased with my project. I think I did a good job working in Aftereffects for the first time and if I could change anything the one thing I would change is the audio being more synchronised.
My first idea for this project was to use fridge magnets in the form of letters to create the words I came up with when I did my 20 minutes of thinking. I then wanted the words to form in to a kind of string that would lead to a picture but when I started my project I changed my mind.