Early Ideas

The first thing I did today was make sure that I was getting to grips with the newly introduced programme After Effects. After a brief inroductory session I was eager to learn more, so decided to take it upon myself to try out a few things. I knew I wanted to work with type rather than just shapes of colour like yesterday, so without being taught anything on the subject I had a guess at how to go about editing type. I used a couple of my more simple storyboard ideas to generate some footage.

My first attempt resulted in a five second, very simple clip. The basic principle is bold, black text (Gill Sans Ultra Bold) on a clean, white background. The 'O' becomes animated and starts to jump up and down slightly, until the momentum is built up so much it breaks through the baseline of the word and bounces offscreen. Below is the footage of this creation.


I then went on to create a second video which still deals with the word bounce. This time I used a slightly different colour scheme; pale blue background with white text, which was also different; Arial. The basic idea with this second video is that all the letters bounce on screen in their own time. The first letter to appear is actually the last letter of the word, E, and vice versa. This ensures that the word will assemble in the right order. Below is my second attempt.



My third attempt is the most complex of them all. I have incorparted several different ideas into one, nine second video. At first I start with the word panning onto the screen, then the E 'falls down' and bounces offscreen. At the same time the rest of the word moves vertically down the page. When it reaches the bottom the C bounces off to the right, whilst the BOU and N simultaneously move horizontally to the right, albeit at different speeds. The N builds up momentum and flies off the top of the screen, by the time it has disappeared the BOU fits neatly into the bottom, right corner. Then the B takes smaller, neater bounes off the left hand side of the page whilst the OU travels diagonally up and to the left also. Below is the video.



Below is a screen capture of what my timeline window looked like with all the appropriate layers and key frames visible. The keyboard shortcuts to just display the edited layer properties tabs came in incredibly useful and helped me keep this window as organised as possible.



I also thought I would experiment with screen grabs for this video as it was the most complex of the three. The clip was nine seconds long and I captured a visual for every 30 second interval so in total there are 19 frames displayed below. Some seem a little redundant, and I could probably display the whole sequence in a lot less.