Final Project

FINAL PROJECT

My project is a series of green screen clips mixed with animations that are a test for videos I will be making this summer for my business.

The first step in the workload was to make the animations. I compiled 3 different animations: my business logo, an apple, and a car spilling gasoline.

For my business logo I had to create the design in photo shop. Then, in after effects, I created a mask to animate the stem of the plant to look as if it were growing. I then attached the leaves with anchor points to the stem and scaled them up and rotated them to make it look as if they were also growing. The hard part was the next part. I took the heart logo and broke it down into particles that repelled inside a mask and then played it backwards to get the desired effect.

The apple was the easiest part. I simply photo shopped 3 different apples: a normal one, one with a bite in it and one that was brown on the inside. I then animated them together.

For the car spilling gas, I drew a person, created a gas pump, and photo shopped a Ferrari. I then animated my person grabbing the gas gun from the gas pump and then sticking it in the Ferrari’s gas tank. At this point I created gasoline by using a particle effect and then using two masks to contain the oil.

Now after all of this was done I filmed my segment in front of a green screen I made in my room. The biggest challenge was the lighting, but everything worked out in the end.

Once I had my footage captured on the computer, I did a quit edit in Avid and then exported everything to after effects. Once I had my animations and footage in after effects it was play time.

I started by using the color key tool to key out the green screen background. I then created masks around the sides where my green screen ended (my green screen was too small and this was a big problem). I used a lot of masks to get a relatively desired clean look. Also I did some very minimal roto-scoping in places where it was needed.

The next part was putting my logo with my green screen footage. I had to make it look like a stem was growing out of my hand. This required a lot of positioning key frames. I then created a mask and put my face in the background of the footage so I could blow the logo out of frame. To animate this I just scaled the logo really big and changed its position in order to achieve the effect of it coming towards the camera.

The next part was to work with the apple animation. Once again I used a lot of positioning points in order to make it look like the apple was in my hand. I also scaled it smaller when I brought the apple in to my wind up right before I threw it at the camera. And once again I scaled it large to make it look like I threw an apple at the camera.

The next part was the easiest. I took my animation of the car spilling gas and just put it in the left corner of the screen.
Once I was done I rendered it, and uploaded it to Vimeo.

: )

Final Project from Matt McClure on Vimeo.