Final Project: Finished

Here's the end product of my final project process.


This is an opening title sequence for my documentary, "Shelter", which is about the Austin animal shelter and a local rescue group.
I started with this tutorial from videocopilot.net.
It was really helpful and I learned a lot from doing it. The background and the light rays I learned from the tutorial. I then added the camera movements and made the text into a shadow instead of just plain text. Overall, I like the end product.

After Effects Final Project1 from Kelly Sloan on Vimeo.

Here is the second half, the credits. I basically just typed out all the text and animated the opacity and position on every layer. It's very easy to do but can be time consuming and difficult to time all the text layers properly.

Final Project Plan

Pitch:
I am going to create the titles and text for my documentary about the Austin animal shelter.

Proposal:
There will be a short title intro that will be in 3d and involve particles and a moving camera. This will be about 15-20 seconds long. There are two parts of the film that will show newspaper headlines and for this I will animate the clips using a camera.
I am following two white dogs in the film. To introduce them I will show a clip of them in the cage and then it will pause with two boxes appearing around their heads to form a snapshot of each. These snapshots will float up as I zoom in on them and their names, Queenie and Rhino, appearing above their heads. For this I will need to motion track the screen shots of them into boxes and motion track their names to the boxes. I may do this for a couple of the other dogs that have parts in the film, but I will definitely do this for Queenie and Rhino because I need more footage of them but can't get it since they've already been put down. There will also be a closing title sequence that will be about 20 seconds.

Since I'm not done editing this documentary yet, things will probably change around a lot so I will have to keep working on this all the way up until the very end.


Schedule:


week 1: type out text, gather the screen shots and newspaper articles, and all the text to be in the credits

week 2: start basic motion

week 3: motion track, finalize text motion

week 4: polish everything

Particles

Immediately when we started doing particles I thought of a zombie head exploding so that's what I did for this project. I took a black cut out of a zombie that I found online, animated it a little, and then bam and some red particles spray out of his head. I was kind of thinking about Kill Bill when I made this. Particles are fun.

Motion Tracking

For some reason this motion tracking stuff went over my head at first, but then I figured it out after a few days of just playing around with it.

First I took this footage of my dog Spooks which was not that smooth:




Then I stabilized it, added his name, and tracked it to his collar.

Green Screen

This wasn't too hard. I put Russell in space and made him rotate a little to look like he was floating in gravity.

Green Screen Project from Kelly Sloan on Vimeo.

Text

Here is some text to go in my portfolio.

Kelly Sloan Portfolio from Kelly Sloan on Vimeo.

3d

3d in After Effects from Kelly Sloan on Vimeo.

I really didn't know what to do for this project until the last minute. I really wanted to try drawing something myself, so I drew some graves from one of my favorite album covers. I painted the background and the ground but you can't really see them that much because of the lighting. Once I figured this whole 3d thing out with the help of Ben, this project finally came together.