DVD Intro
This was my Mid-term project in my Motion Graphics class. It’s actually all using After Effects though, since it’s what I prefer. The idea was to make a DVD menu for you demo reel. The idea was to have a sparsely decorated room with a television and excerpts from some of the work I’d done before. So I’ve ended up with a montage of my current creations. The Sad Hunter (the first person shown) is from my animation called The Sad Hunter, he’s a hunter who’s only friend and wife is a raccoon skin hand puppet. The Reverend Kibbles (the green guy) is from The Very Reverend Kibbles, a 3d animation I did of a tin toy I animated. LesPsych (playing on television when camera zooms in) is short live action film about an actress who questions if she can ever really know anything about herself or if her facade is so good even she can’t see through it. The Girl Whose Parents Turned Into Dragons (squiggly girl in corner) is from an unfinished animation of the same title, a crayon animation about a girl who has to find a way to save her parents and herself after they’ve been turned into dragons. And finally The Gingerbread Man (on television upon zooming out), featured in many things I’ve done is an superhero stick puppet who, in the scene shown, is trying to tell some kids about what he does for a living.
Method:
This was actually surprisingly difficult to make, trying to get so many different types of mediums to work in the same environment, along with making an environment in a program that at the time I didn’t know very well was tough. I obviously played with lights in the scene and even have a blue light coming from behind the TV (casting an ever so faint glow of static of the video). I had a lot of fun just experimenting with what could be done with lights and cameras, I even created a few negative light to help keep shadows where I wanted them. To give the room more effect I created some fog particle systems in Motion and then have them going in various ways throughout the scene, giving a bit of a “someone’s been chain smoking in this room” feel. Rendering out Kibbles and animating The Sad Hunter and then making sure all the alpha channels worked wasn’t horrifically easy either. The strangest thing to come out of this project though was the crayon girl, I really didn’t know what to expect when I went to try to add her in. I actually drew about 6 frames for a loop of her sitting there, then color keyed the white out. I actually really didn’t think it would work well but it did and I really enjoy how the light filters through her back onto the wall creating weird shadows and light. The final interesting thing was creating the static, it was done with a static function in after effects, but the initial static looked horrible, so I actually overlaid ones of different sizes so you got static of all sizes than had different ones have different levels of opaqueness. Finally, I added a couple different Gaussian blurs on various layers and I was really surprised at how well it turned out. If you watch through the end it will show the DVD menu which actually loops back really far to the point you can barely see the movie because you’re staring through so many TV’s…nothing complicated with this though, just different renders.