I started to play around with a few ideas for how my website may look on Photoshop. I put together a few elements, some images and some text to see how it looked. I already had an idea in my mind, so I just wanted to see how it looked in reality.
This is pretty much what I expect the main page to look like (It only looks this blurry on the blog, it’s much crisper on my computer). The text will be an introduction to the website and any recent news about the website that they should know about. There will also be the box to login available on every page.
The image on the left is a stock photo I found of some people jumping in a field. I just cut them out in photoshop, silhouetted them and added an oval in a colour that fits the theme of the page. I think it fits really well along with the text and balances out the weight from the login box, adding a space to each side of the page.
Last week we we’re given a brief to create a logo for a company. They specialise in training dogs to be better behaved and wanted the logo to reflect this. I started by sketching an idea I had.
The thought process behind this design is it shows a hand reaching out to a dog, palm upwards, to show that they trust and care for the dog. They could be giving them a treat, rewarding good behaviour. Simply having your hand that close to a dogs mouth (and in effect, teeth) shows that the human trusts the dog.
In the workshop we took our drawn ideas and created them in Adobe Illustrator.
I chose the colours green and yellow as they are quite passive and friendly colours and that reflects the theme I am going for with this logo. The name for the company is really just to fill space and show where the name would be. I don’t think the name that is there now is fully appropriate but it does still show the message I want to give off with this logo.
This week we learned about adding images and creating shapes in Photoshop and After Effects, and animating them using keyframes. We started by finding an image of a kitten and then finding something for them to look at.
The image I went for was a man doing a backflip, and my plan was to make this guy do a backflip over the cat as it watches in awe. We started by cutting the images out, isolating them from their backgrounds. This was mainly done with the pen tool as it provides a lot of accuracy since the user decides where each point is added. It can take longer than some other tools but the cleanness that you can achieve is worth it.
To animate these images I imported them into after effects and key-framed in their movements. This included the dude rotating over a period of time, and following a curved path across the screen. The cat follows the dude with it’s head and the body (which the head is attached to) turns and moves slightly, making it look like it is rolling.
While my final project probably won’t be… quite like this, it gives a lot of ideas for things that I can do with this software.
Instead of manually selecting points for After Effects to track, 3D tracking involves the software scanning a al of a video clip for points to track, and then compiles all the data together for easier use by the user. The first video included the same box as the first 2D tracking video, but this time the camera was moving and the camera was still.
Since After Effects had detected where the surface of the box was in a 3D space, I simply added the text on top of it. I also gave them a shadow by adding a light and telling it where to cast the shadow. It was simple to add text to a flat surface as After Effects can work out by analysing the whole clip where each surface is in space. It simple needs points that it can recognise and can track the movement of. The dots in the box, and even the corners of the box itself, are perfect for this.
I also added a black rectangle over a magazine on the right. Adding it was just as simple as adding the text, but what’s really impressive about this is that since it is adding it into a 3D space by working out how the camera is moving, it can continue to move accurately even when when the magazine is out of shot. This is different to 2D tracking, because if one of the points I manually selected for tracking went out of frame After Effects could even begin to guess where it is now, and so just stops tracking that area. With 3D tracking, there are many other point for it to look out for so it can work out where that area is, even when the surface i’ve added something to is no longer visible.
Next we had a video of a road, with the camera moving around, and we were giving an image of a hole. After Effects was able to track where the ground was, and I then laid the hole on that surface. I wanted to give the hole depth, and to do that I would need to simulate a parallax effect. To do this, I duplicated the layer with the hole on it, placed it above the original and masked out the actual hole, leaving only the cracked edges. I also mad the bottom layer of the hole bigger, so you couldn’t see the edge again inside the hole. Lastly, I made it so that everything that could be seen of the bottom hole layer that was outside the top hole (so not including the actual hole) would be masked out. This was to hide the edges of the bottom layer so you would only see the edges of the top layer. I then just added a grungy texture and did some colour correction to make it all blend in better.
It was surprisingly simple to add something like this to a layer, and I’ll definitely have to look into using it further for my final project. I already have a few ideas to use After Effect’s tracking capabilities but I want to try the other some things in the other workshops before I finalise anything.
I missed the workshop this week (alarms aren’t what they used to be) so I’m going entirely off of what I learned in the videos on blackboard. This week we were learning about how to use the 2D tracking tools in After Effects. We were given a video of a box with 5 dots in it moving around while keeping the dots visible at all times. We could use the dots to track the movement of the box and attach something to it.
It achieves a simple but striking effect. The dots in the corners make the tracking process much simpler as it is easier for After Effects to see the movement as it is happening. But if there aren’t any big obvious dots that are purposely kept in frame at all times, you’ll need to find something else to use.
In this video I changed the sky to look more interesting, added the sun and lens flare effects and changed the colours of the whole scene. To track the movement of the shot I used the head light post on the right and the top right corner of the first building from the left. Since these had quite defined shapes (circles and corners) and never left the shot, After Effects was able to track their movement and from this the movement of the camera. This allowed me to attach the sky and sun to the movement that After Effects tracked so that they would move with the ground.
The box video was good to get to grips with 2D tracking, but second ones definitely shows the true potential of motion tracking. Since After Effects can track how the camera is moving, as well as the things in the scene, you can add in whatever you need, e.g. a new sky, and it won’t look out of place.
