Camera Rigging in After Effects

While doing some of the After Effects tests I noticed the camera was very awkward to use. I'm now at the stage where I can begin compositing my animation together so I thought it'd be a good time to see if there was an easier way to go about animating the camera.

I had a quick look on Google and came across this tutorial from Vimeo user ThinkMojo, Inc.

Better Camera Animation in After Effects from Thinkmojo, Inc. on Vimeo.

I've now set up my own Camera Rig using this tutorial and I'm now very glad I made the effort as I'm sure this will save a lot of headaches during the compositing process.

Final Room

Once I finished adjusting the proportions of my objects I added some colour and texture to them to make my background a bit more interesting and contrast from the flat white rotoscope sections. 

As I did with the test room, I exported each side separately as Jpegs. Where necessary I used the TIFF format to include transparency. An example of this is the window.

*insert video here*

Alignment templates

To create my final sound visualisations, I decided to employ a method I used on my sound-driven experiment set to 'Teardrop' by Massive Attack. By creating alignment templates, I'll be able to worry less about the direction of each shape and more on the timing, allowing me to create a smoother and neater result.

Here are the 4 templates I created for the first section:

Here's the first final sound visualisation section, I'm quite pleased with how it has turned out.

Colour Palettes

To make sure my colour transitions are nice and smooth I decided to pick a limited number of colours and create gradients between each of them. I then picked out 8 colours from each gradient so I can use these as references when creating the colour transitions in the sound visuals.

Sound Visualisation testing continued

Using the animation from my previous post, I created this test which uses some colour. I think this will contrast nicely with the bland and colourless animation that will be the background and setting for these sound visualisations.

I think the colour adds a lot to it and I'll have to create some colour palettes to pick the colours from to achieve smooth colour transitions.

Sound Visualisation Testing

Now that the room is coming together and most of the rotoscoping is done, it's time to start experimenting with visualising the music like I did in the animatic. Here are a few things I came up with.

White and Black

Black and White

Strobe

On this one I decided to try alternating between black and white to see what it looked like. It creates an interesting strobe kind of effect that could possibly help to make some parts stand out.

3D room and objects

After taking measurements of the objects, I made templates for each of them in Illustrator and began trying to assemble them in After Effects.

When I made the first templates, I was converting Feet and Inches to pixels, which didn't work out accurately because of there being 12" to 1ft instead of 10. Either way the first one wasn't too far off in terms of proportions. I managed to comp some of the rotoscope footage I've completed so far into this test to have a rough go at the beginning of the animation. 

After finishing this test I decided to have a go at reworking the measurements on the templates. This time I converted them from Feet & Inches to centimeters and adjusted the templates to have 1 pixel for each centimeter, this gave more accurate proportions. Once all templates are finalized I will scale up the artwork to around about double the size needed so that when I import them into AE and scale down by half, it will create a super-sampling effect meaning minimal pixelation! The downside to this is that using such high resolution images can be very demanding in terms of computing resources but I shouldn't have any problems there.

Here's an example of the templates I created in order to make the 3D room: