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.