Test Movs

Titles

I gave this piece of music titles. Which were wording in a “chalkduster” font and set to white. The reason for the colouring is again to give the text the “flying paper” feel to it. The beginig title came from the back to the front in time to the music and other objects. This was created with scale and position.

The ending titles again have a movement to them, which was a back to front sense however, all of the the paper stages moved forward in time with the title so that the final shot is “The End” with just 2 paper layers to is and a black background.

test render

Colouring and twirling

The paper effect works well on this piece but I felt that as some last touches there needed to be just a touch of colour needed. What I wanted to create was some running alternate colours around the edges of the piece. This was give almost a disco effect, or light games effect. I added a “Hue/Saturation” effect onto each of the ‘paper’ layers in the final comp section. I used a pink colour and blue colour, with an opacity set so that the colours where too strong and you could still see the paper texture.

Settings

I then applied these same settlings to all of the paper textures and had the times different so that the colours ran towards the camera and each paper layer alternated colour.

The last effect that I placed was a twirling effect. There were two section to the music that had a random sound to it and at which point the ‘playing instruments’ looked slightly unnatural therefore I applied a twirl to the whole composition.

This was applied to the single “paper stage” comp, it was a null object that I then had set to  one full rotation clockwise for the first intelude and then 1 full rotation anti-clockwise for the second interlude.

Twirl

Extras

After running through the music and animation togetehr I noticed that there was a few more areas for change, just to make the visual and the sound work together better.

There was some open spaces where there was some piano sections, I therefore needed to added this element into the short. This meant going back to work on the first white comp. I brought in a visual of a keyboard.

keyboard

The are two sections of piano work that happen quite close together with a short gap. I therefore have choosen to spilt up the showing of this keyboard. By using a mask, I revealed the first half of the keybaord in time to the music, and then it unvealed the rest of the keyboard when the second piano part played.

First Reveal

Second Reveal

Masking

Because the white keys on the piano there should be a nice paper effect that works on there.

Final keyboard

Deviantart

Link to my deviantart page and favourites is:

http://comwizdesign.deviantart.com/

Creating the 3D paper cut out effect

This is the technical side of the animation. Trying to get movement not only on the x and y axis but also get the 3D feel with the z axis.

To do this I neded another new comp created with the ‘paper stage’ comp. This therefore create a link from the original white layer to the paper layer the new final output layer.

The first layer is a control layer, which is to keep structure and give the expressions that I will be using so focal point. The images below show the effects that I used.

Control 1

Control expanded

The next thing to be added is to bring in the “paper stage” comp itself. To get the idea of many paper layers and movement it is this layer that my expressions will be added to.

Effects

The ‘Time remapping’ it what I used to control the layer and the movement so that when the layer is duplicated there will be so randomness and movement, which will make animation look like the beats of the music are running from one sheet of paper to the other, with the it running forward.

Time remapping expression

To make the effect look more realistic the I had to play around with the exposure and the positioning. While linking these factors to the music with the time remapping. I did this with the following expressions.

Position expression

Exposure expresion

The position expression, involves the ‘random’ command so that there is not a fixed structure to the paper when I duplicate the layers, there will be a free flow to it.

This layer is the made 3D

3D

Because I now have a 3D enabled layer I can use a light to create more depth with shadowing and similar light work. As these setting show it is simply a point light with maximum intensity.

Light settings

The final thing to do is to duplicate the ‘paper stage’ layer in order to get the depth, I have duplicated mine to a total of 7 paper layers, this gives the depth that I wanted but not to an extreme level. All the layers are still 3D enables and have the same expressions to them.

Layers

Assignment 2: Final image: As Time Goes By

As Time Goes By

Assignment 2: Bringing it all together

I brought all of these images into ‘Photoshop’ to create the scene that I had envisaged. I needed a long canvass to get the landscape shots that I wanted.

On the right hand side the head will be placed and the rest of the cliff scene with spitfires will spread out to the left hand side. The head and hat I wanted to be the size of the full height. so this was the first element to place. Around this I laid down two ‘letterbox’ lines above and below this.

From here, I could then mark out the lay out a little bit better. The cliffs render is effectively a horizontal line, so this was the next element laid down with my sky and the water attached to it.

Finally the spitfires were brought in and placed.

spitfires

In photoshop i replicated the spitfires, reduced the opacity and then transformed them so that the shadow effect was created. Shadows were rendered in houdini however it did not look as good as the photoshop shadows (something that I need to consider and work on for next time).

I finally added text of a title “As Time goes by” to complete this image. I was happy with this look but as a last touch I wanted to get the sense of time moving so Have de saturated two areas of the images so there is a time flow: from now-then-now-then.

Assignment two: final image