New Year, New Antics

Hello again!

Presently, I am halfway through my second semester at NYU-CADA, and have probably set several new standards for inefficient blogging. (Poor time management skills.) However, I hope to make up for some of that lost time now by covering a few of the projects that have been keep me occupied lately.

My two classes this time around are 2D Tool Sets and 3D Tool Sets. Primarily, I am dealing with one program for each class: AfterEffects and Maya. As detailing Maya and 3D space requires lots of technical terms like "polynomial expressions," which continue to give me a headache, I am going to skip it for now.

In an ideal world, I would have taken 2D last semester when I was struggling to work with AfterEffects for "Picture Window." I have been working almost entirely in AE for this class, occasionally importing files from Photoshop. The work thus far has been mastering keyframes, which enable you to chose a point on a timeline and assign various values to the footage. There are five properties: anchor point, position, scale, rotation, and opacity. In addition, AE's many effects functions each contain variations on these properties, resulting in an infinite set of adjustments to the layers in a composition. In "Picture Window," each individual shape that falls into place to build the waves, ark, and sky, has at least two keyframes that tell the shape where to start and end. (Or in my case, end and start, as I worked backwards and played it forward.)

However, you may find this bobblehead-version of myself as Grace Kelly a more amusing example. My movements between scenes are position and scale keyframes, and the bobbing is done using a set of rotation keyframes that have been put on a loop using Javascript code. Sorry for the pixellation--I had to cut the video dimensions in half to upload it.



More to come on rotoscoping later this week!

~J