Sarah's After Effect Workshop No.3
- Thomas Hughes
- Nov 22, 2022
- 2 min read
Updated: Dec 6, 2022
Brief:
Your task for this workshop is to design and create a short movie about a colour of your choice. Choose a colour, and find something interesting to say, or include in your work. This will be a production
workshop. I will cover storyboards , sound archives, working with digital assets and key-framing techniques. Your brief is to create a short movie 10 seconds in length.
For this project I wanted to figure out on my own how to animate a layer along a drawn path. For future uses I wrote down an easy step-by-step guide:
Create a path
Select a layer and use the Pen tool to create anchor points for a path.
Click and drag to add anchor points and expose the handles.
Move the handles to adjust the shape of the path.
Use the path to create position keyframes
Switch to the Select tool in the Toolbar.
Select the layer which contains the path and press M to reveal the Mask Path property.
Select the words Mask Path and then choose Edit > Copy to copy the path.
Select the layer to which you want to apply the path and press P to reveal the Position parameter.
Select the word Position in the Timeline and choose Edit > Paste to add the path data as Position keyframes.
Going back to the brief, I chose to go with the colour cyan and create a 10 second clip of anything I think of when I use the colour. One of my first ideas was to think about how cyan seen. Some people think it's more green than blue, or more blue than green. I started with a simple question with block movement to draw the viewer in. I then used the venetian blinds effect to close these bars before animating the next section.
As already explained, I then key-framed the movement of a pencil to follow a line as if it were drawing on paper. I created the pencil vector in Illustrator and imported this as footage with all the other layers directly into After Effects.
To fade back to a blank screen, I used the 'Block Dissolve' effect before allowing more text appear. I repeated the process of the pencil and fade a second time, before finishing with a 'CC Jaws' effect. This effect acts a wipe and transitions between two backgrounds in an interesting way.
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