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.