Finished Explorer Logo!

Explorer Logo from Wesley Cathon on Vimeo.

Alas! Something finally breaks through a wall of completion. Amongst many different projects, I'm a little surprised the one to finish first is the one that has nothing to do with thesis. It took a lot longer than expected because I was honing a few secret, ancient after-effects techniques, a few of which I'm probably going to try and use frequently from now on.

One of these is something a little more familiar to those who work with real cameras: rack focus. That's when you change the focus in-shot to emphasize something in a different plane further or closer to the camera. Here's a good example:

To accomplish this in after effects, first you have to make a solid layer (or I think adjustment layers work fine? I don't know, just keep it a 2d layer). Then you add the "ramp" effect; a ramp is literally the same thing as a gradient in photoshop. Anyways, make it a radial ramp (in the effect options) and set the colors to black and white, black on the inside and white on the outside. Move the center of the ramp to the furthest location you want to be focusing in on. It doesn't matter where it is in the layers.
Now what you've just done is make a map for your focusing. Make sure that you have a camera layer, and apply the "Camera Lens Blur" effect to it. Somewhere in the controls, you can set that ramp layer as the map for the blur (once done, you can make the ramp layer invisible because it is only a map to tell the camera where you want the blur to encompass. It doesn't need to be seen in the composition). Once you've done that, you can play around with/keyframe the blur and focal distance controls to move the focus back and forth from the camera. WEEEEE! Also- for these shots I moved some of the foreground layers on top of the ramp layer so that they wouldn't be affected by the camera blur. It just made it easier to make them stand out more.

The other technique I was messing with (that was a lot easier for me to wrap my head around) was the lighting underneath the trees. All that was, was a series of adjustment layers with random shapes made with the pen tool. Those shapes served as masks for a "Brightness and Contrast" effect that bumped up the brightness of those areas. Feather out those masks and voila! You have some static light rays bouncing off of whatever is on screen! You can mess with this further by making them 3d layers, and pushing them behind certain other layers. This could make it seem like light beams falling through trees, instead of just overlaying highlights. and stuff.

Anyways, enough of that technical junk. This is the first time I've ever made anything like this. It was a lot easier than animating traditionally, but I lost a lot of life in the character. I thought this was okay though, it's really only about 18 seconds. The puppet tool made up for a lot of that. The explorer in the second shot was actually one still image that I was able to bend around and animate from a crouching to standing.

The sound was mostly just random tidbits of public domain clips. The music was taken from an older song I was recording a few months back. FUN FACT: The flute used in the music is called a bansuri flute, which the blog is named after

So yeah. Hopefully the claymation will be done soon. I just need to buckle down and get the music for that finished. Until then, enjoy life! And gezpacho!