Assignment Five: Masks, Mattes and Stencils

First results from a poorly lit homemade garage greenscreen. The shadows are pretty bad. Need to figure out a better way to make those.

Assignment Four: Utilize variable time: acceleration, deceleration, hold, etc.

I'm trying to learn some more advanced expressions, other than simple "this equals whatever this other value is" expressions. So I came up with this animation, which is controlled almost entirely with expressions.

First, the ball's movement is random using the wiggle() expression. The ball's size and color change directly related to the current speed of the ball, both of which required tweaking the math to translate the speed into the proper scale or color values.

The particles are seperate. They follow the position of the ball using simple expressions. The actual number of particles emitted per second vaires with the speed. Their velocity also matches whatever direction and speed that the ball is traveling in, which is a pretty cool effect.

By the time I finished, I had used a ton of expressions, and it's confusing to explain them, so here's a screenshot showing them all:






Also, last couple of posts have been late, but I am back on track now and all other assignments will be on time! Possibly even early!

Assignment Three: 5-10 Second Animation Using Scale and Position

I'm really not even sure what happened here. This kinda creeps me out.

Assignment Two: Assets and Elements

Assignment: bring in at least 5 images (text, paths, raster images). 3 must have alpha.

1) I found a pretty sweet picture of some guys juggling. I cut them out of the background:



Here's a larger version of just the left guy. The matte is a little dirty, but I think it will work fine with a darker background and scaled down to video size.


I left each juggler and element on it's own layer. I plan on using the puppet tool (which I've only briefly played with) in After Effects to animate these guys into some kind of creepy juggling puppet show. If I get really into it I might even try to set the bowling pins on fire.




2) Here's a quick logo I made, with alpha:

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this yet, motion-wise. I had to rasterize it to get the gradient, but I may go back to a vector version to bring into after effects, and then readd the gradient in AE to the vector.


3) A Unicorn!

Dunno what I'll do with this yet, I just found it accidentally. Probably the aforementioned jugglers will end up in front of this backdrop.


4) A nebula!

This is a pretty cool backdrop/texture.



5) A chainsaw.

I figure I'll throw this into the juggling mix to spice things up a bit. It has alpha, but I kind of cheated because the background was solid white so cutting it out was super easy.


That's all for now, I think.

Introduction: Geoff Allison

My name is Geoff. I'm a senior RTF student at UT, specializing in Directing and all kinds of film production/post production.

Here's a picture of me getting shot by a laser.

Here's what I'd look like as a pirate.

I've been using photoshop and after effects for many years, although I'm still a fairly poor graphic designer. I really love doing compositing and green screening and "photoshopping" and trying to make things look realistic.

I feel like a have a fairly solid knowledge of visual effects, so I'm kind of hoping to be able to get into more advanced things in this class, even though I know that may not be possible. I'm looking forward to learning about Illustrator and vector graphics, since I don't deal much with those. I need to get better at the design side of logos and motion graphics.

I really would love to learn how to get things to look "realistic," or like you'd see in Hollywood movies. I'm good at manipulating footage, but not creating my own elements from scratch.

I have a demo reel! It has some VFX stuff about a minute in.

I might put my resume up here someday too.