Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Magical Girl Jenna Final Thoughts and Self Reflection

Overall I'm not completely happy with the result of my project. Some of the effects are not quite polished as much as I'd like them to be, but for my first time using the tools, I'm not confident that I can apply my new knowledge to whatever project I do in the future.

The project deadlines were very rushed. We only had a few days to do this very complex assignment and it made the project tough to do if you didn't have the software at home. I believe that for future classes, the project deadline needs to be extended or the project itself needs to be dialed back to create less work for students.

The clone stamp tool was by far the hardest part. I couldn't get the mast to blend in quite the way I would like it and then it disappears for a single frame. Next time I will have to take more care not to let the mask be carelessly erased.

Jenna The Magical Girl Clone Stamp Thought Process

Using the clone stamp tool, I wanted to remove something from my scene rather than put something in. On the ceiling was an ugly light fixture that I wanted to remove. Taking a sample from much farther away, I brushed over the lights and removed them to the best of my ability.

I did have some trouble with the clone stamp process. Given that I used the eraser tool to erase something very close to my clone stamp, it temporarily got erased! When I have more time, I plan to redo that scene, possibly layering them differently or being more careful with my eraser tool.

Magical Girl Jenna Final Result

Magical Girl Jenna Final from Christina N. on Vimeo.

Magical Girl Jenna Raw Footage

Magical Girl Jenna Raw from Christina N. on Vimeo.

Magical Girl Jenna Intro

This week we worked with the brush tools in After Effects, including the clone stamp tool, eraser tool, and the above mentioned brush tool to create hand drawn visual effects and seamless masks.

For this project, I had to shoot my own footage and import it into After Effects. Then, using the brush tool, I had to animate hand drawn brush strokes appearing on the screen in some kind of way. Then the opposite had to be done, brush strokes had to appear to be erasing. After that a time-reverse effect had to be applied, making brush strokes appear to be drawn off of the screen. Lastly we had to make text appear on the screen using the brush techniques we learned in previous tutorials and clone stamp something out of sight (featuring motion trackers!).