Text Animation
Before this project I’d never really worked with text much. I also hadn’t worked with After Effect nearly at all, so a lot of this was learning how to animate with it. The project was from my Motion Graphics class and was to animate a quote in a way that looked interesting. The quote is from the short film LesPsych that I made; I was unsure whether I should use it or not because it seemed a bit prideful to quote oneself but the professor liked it a lot so I went with it. The idea was to create a feeling of loneliness and isolation in the first part and then in the second create a feeling of togetherness or saneness, this all done by in the first part the words dropping into a void and in the second they drop together onto a picture of th earth. I’ll admit it’s a bit cheesy, but I’m not sure if word animation can ever really rise above that. At the least I think this is a lot more professional looking than most work animation, it uses 3d space and comping instead of powerpoint.
Method:
This project was fairly easy on the surface, I pretty much just animated text falling like it was going into a void, the actual animating it so that it looked right was a bit more difficult than it seems. I created the fog in Motion then overlaid multiple layers at different heights and moving in different directions within each other, this all produced the effect of tumultuous fog. I then added see through screens that actually blurred out the text as they fell so that it looked like the words were being obscured by the fog. The second part was fairly easy because I just had the various word fall into place. The only difficult part was making the world have enough showing that you knew it was earth while also not looking weird. It also took some time to figure out how much it should spin and with how much motion blur.