An afterthought for after effects

-understanding of the program-

ok so let me explain how i've explained my animation process to myself as i go along. i've basically set it out as

1st pass (animatic/pre-pro) 2nd pass clean up and animation, and 3rd pass being taking the file into after effects to mess around with the visuals.

-Green screen-

One work around i thought of was to use free stock footage in order to fill blanks in animation for things that i either didnt want to do, or didnt thing prudent. for these scenes i set up a bakcground layer that had a flat green colour. i then took those animated files into after effects and used the liniar clor key effect to remove the green screen behind the animation and instead replace it with footage. this technique was mostly used in the 4th scene on the bus, again this was a method of cutting down on the animation where it really wasnt needed. once the greenscreen had been keyed out of the picture i then placed free (creative commons) lisenced videos i scound the internet for of cars driving. then it was a case of making the footage black and white by simply dragging over a filter onto the video clip, then in orget to hide the jaring look of real footage and animated lines i blured the video footage. this give off a nice effect that shows the bus is in motion and by using stock footage i didn't have to go through and make scrolling backgrounds for a few shots where it's not even the focus.

-blending masks and fight sticks

one effect i've grown quite accostom to using is using layers with blending masks on them to create textured effects. I originally learned to do this in order to take comissions online in developing "fightstick arcade art" this has mostly been something on the side when im low on money and i need to make a quick few bucks to buy food for the week. as a student that can happen a lot. anyway ever since first year i've been making these commissions and i have largely come to appreciate blending masks with textures, and one thing i'm glad i learned about after effects (and even premier) is that it supports blending masks but for video layers.

with this i was able to slice together free FVX i found in orger to give my film a more textured and finished look. by adding a film ledger and other effects (like stattic or video glitches) i was able to give the film a very unique and distinctive look for the most part, and it definately helps to keep it's inhuman atmosphere.

-editing-

now editing took a while, and truthfully it's not at all done untill i have all my scenes done. however for now i feel i did a good job of repositioning the footage to match the audio.

it was also a late choice in production to change around scene 4-5 the reason for that is because after giving it some thought i could see it as a way to make the story flow better within the film, and the scenes arent just disjointed

-exporting-

what can i say about this really? i mean i've been burned in the past here a few times so i made extra sure to export early when i had the time for it to take 5 minds-5 hours or however long it wanted to be rendering for. i used the adobe media encoder to export both the after effects files and premier files. because when i havent used AME to export animations they have come out at really high file sizes of about 5gb for a 50 second scene.

thankfully due to this i was able to keep my film under a gig after exporting

-a premier finish-

ok so after effects wasnt the end of the edditing. i actually switched it up once i did all the major edditing and effects to Adobe premier for a few reasons.

firstly i wanted to convert the file i had in after effects (that has a vast aray of pre-compositions) and as they size of the timeline grew and i found it more time consiming and frustrating to make any changed to the footage as i would then have to re-position everything. so i exported over to A.premier so i could work on a less clusted workspace because the video was merged together and i only had to deal with one timeline object.

secondly I find the user interface of premier a little easier to navigate when it comes to cupping up sound and audio (thanks first year panting and sound project) as i have a lot more freedom over what i do with clips in the timeline (aside from editing after effects style that is) and thirdly, after my last after effects edit needed some changes as i had forgotton to censor the rude word, so i did that in premier with a simple edit. and finally! i used it to put together some end credits because again, allthough after effects can do it, and probably better, premier pro can also do it, and simpler.