Last year we looked at basic camera skills in adobe after effects , we did this by using the camera to move through various font styles to finally end up with a final frame of a phrase or quote that we chose.
The inspiration for this workshop was sourced from a music video of the band MGMT , the music involved the camera panning backwards through a range of scenery and textures to tell a story , i like the video as it had a lot of flow to it and the transitions are very smooth and well thought about.
This workshop focused on more complicated camera movements using a two node camera more so than one node camera. This allowed us to focus the camera on certain areas and not just head on camera angles. For the following task we had to pick something from the surrounding area that we wanted to animate , i felt that creating a building or structure would be too time consuming so i chose to recreate a pigeon. I chose wool textures to give my animation a friendly and approachable style , this is not something i would normally pick for my designs however i feel that it worked well as it kept the animation looking good and to a consistent style. i used layer masking to fit the textures to the shapes and once they were all ready i exported them to Aftereffects to be added to my composition.
When i imported all my layers into the composition i made them all 3d in order to give me use of the Z axis. i then added a top view camera to allow me to arrange the elements of the composition in the correct order. Once everything was arranged i set key points at the start and end of my composition so i could start adding each individual camera movement when navigating through my scenes. I needed to leave big enough gaps between each element to allow smooth camera flow, this involved a lot of resizing images to make the final image as accurate as possible.
As the camera was two node i had two separate paths to tamper with to get the best angles for the final composition. i struggled with this at first but after a while i started to look at it as a pen tool motion , the best camera angels were the ones with the smooth flowing curves , i managed to direct the camera successfully as i added the key frames in-between the start and the end point giving the camera more sense of direction.
