Compositing and Special Effects - Lectures and Tutorials

26/03/2018 - 30/03/2018 (Week 1)
Liam Yue Wei (0327686)
Compositing and Special Effects
Introduction to Compositing and Special Effect

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Lecture

Week 1 

26/03/2018 (Monday) 

Mr.Kannan and Mr.Martin started off by briefing us on the module assignments. 

Project 1: Opening title sequence 

Settings for Adobe After Effects 

- 30 secs 1080p full HD

- H2. 64, MPEG

- Audio: 44.100kHz Stereo

- QuickTime H2.64

In compositing and special effects, there are few things to pay attention to:

1. images

2. color sceheme

3. music

4. 3D modeling (free from web, but have to give credits) 

Project 2: Matte Painting

- The initial stage of the projects is to make thumbnails and storyboards, these need to be simple, nice and believable. 

- We were told that to it is hard to master matte painting and it needs a lot of time. 

Final project: Motion Graphic

- We have to look for music with nice beats. 

- Tons of experiments and researches need to be done for this project. 

- Animation is essential.

Extra Notes:

- In this module, we usually use Adobe After Effects for compositing and Adobe Premiere for editing. However, we must not depend too much on the software. 

- For 3D, it is advisable for us to use cinema 4D.

- Sometimes, we need to mix 2D and 3D for compositing and special effects.

- Simple story/ motive can trigger emotional scenes as well.

- A matte painting is a painted representation of a landscape, set, or distant location that allows filmmakers to create the illusion of an environment that is not present at the filming location. Matte painting is photorealistic style.

- Mise en scene, rules of third, and golden ratio are very crucial in compositing and special effects. 

- For Adobe After Effects, choose HDTV 1080 25 for the settings. Go to File > Edit > Compositing, to create new composition. 

- Edit > Preference > Media and Disk Cache > Empty Disk Cache. 

30/03/2018 (Friday)

- Do thumbnails for ideation process. It doesn't have to be complex, it can be simple, just thumbnails, and update it with latest ideas.

- For thumbnails, it has to be sketch + description. This is to let the teammates (for the work) to understand your ideas.

- In compositing and special effects, it is crucial to obey the rule of 180 degree camera, it is not good to let the camera shift too much as it will make the audience confused.

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Tutorial

Class activity: 

We were all assigned to a group of 5 but in my case, a group of 4. Finding an opening title sequence as an example to jot down the key elements and share it to the rest of the group mates, and eventually find out the commons of the opening title sequences. 

- I chose the intro of the Jazzpunk game.

The key elements found in this intro are: 

- Color scheme

- Shapes (Simple shapes, symbolic)

- Typography (Readable, suitable for the theme)

- Contrast 

- Repetition

- Space 

- Balance (Symmetry)

- Line

- Movement

- Timing

- Music

At the end of the day, the common key elements we found in the opening title sequences that each of our group mates chose are: 

- Color

- Tempo

- Shape and Symbol

- Typography

- Music

- Silhouette 

- Principle of Animation

- Focal point

- Repetition

- Composition

- Space

We were reminded that we can recreate from the existing movies for our project 1. Editing and compositing are different. Also, we were told to pay more attention to: 

- Color scheme

- Typography

- Lighting

- 2D animated or 3D movies

- Point of interest (in the opening title sequence) 

- Genre

- Mood boards (find reference and extract images)

- Ending titles (for more inspiration) 

Our lecturer has also recommended few websites for us to try out for this module:

1. Videocopilot (Tutorial videos for compositing and special effects)

2. School of Motion (Tutorial videos for motion graphics)

3. Mister Horse Animation Composer (Free plug-ins for After Effects) 

We can use any files from Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop or anything in Adobe After Effects. For transparency, PNG is the best, and for solid, JPEG is good.

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02/04/2018 - 06/04/2018 (Week 2)
Liam Yue Wei (0327686)
Compositing and Special Effects
Adobe After Effects

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Lecture / Tutorial

- layer > create > create shapes from vector layer.
- Track Matte = best to be done with back and white images.
- To do track matte, layer 1 = text, layer 2 = iamge (change to alpha/ luma).
- Move an image to above track matte layer, and it will immediately make the image as track.
- JPEG = visual effect (luma) for the color and texture, then go to Effect Control/ Effect Presets.
- During the tutorial, we were told not to do 30s or 40s exercises in Adobe After Effects. Do the short ones to understand the fundamental.
- Edit > Purge > All Memory and Disk Cache
- Press U to highlight keyframes components.
- Hold alt > Highlight entire keyframes > drag and squeeze to change the gap between the keyframes.
- F9 = Easy Ease
- Shift + F9 = Easy Ease In
- Ctrl + Shift + F9 = Easy Ease Out
- To trim timeline = act + ]
- To move clip in timeline = ]
- Be sure to name all the layers.


Exercise

This is one of the small exercises I tried out on After Effects. There were some problems during the exercise, the image behind disappears right after 1 second. After a while only I figured that I accidentally dragged more than ONE image into the screen. SO I changed to another ONE image and it's now fixed.

For this small exercise too, I tried out the track matte with shapes moving around. The problem I encountered is that I cannot make several shapes alpha matte with ONE background/ image. After this, I would like to further explore if there is any way for me to achieve that.