Week 6A

Feedback: This class I got some much-needed feedback from my peers and professor. All of my questions in the last post were answered and I was able to complete my storyboards. I needed to see how I wanted to animate the chocolate. I didn't know if the splash or the dunk would be more effective. I know that the company keeps it on the rather classy side so I knew that I couldn't have things moving all over the place. Another suggestion was to have a mask go across the letters instead of each one being drawn in individually. The main reason why I decided to go away from the drawn the idea is the fact that each word has a different amount of letters. So my peers and I agreed that the mask going across would be a better idea.



Story boards: one of the biggest things I discovered with my storyboard was that I was showing too much apparently. One of my peers pointed out that I was really showing a lot of unnecessary things in my plans. So I will be cutting back on some of them.

sounds: we went over different ways of adding and obtaining sound effects for our animation. now I have used audacity before but I also didn't really take advantage of the tool pallet. so I think that I will definitely use that this time. also, I think I will be going with a plop sound for the strawberry as it goes down in the chocolate.

Week 5 Outside of class

This week outside of class was spent working on our digital storyboards. Basically this led me to get many questions for example:

1. How should I have my strawberry move should it be during all the letters moving in or after.
2. Will I be able to use an image traced version to wipe across the screen in after effects? 
3. Should the letters flow in or should there be a square moving from left to right in order to reveal them? 

so when seeing that I only needed to have them halfway done I knew why its because while planning this out I just had questions. I haven't explored this realm with after effects yet and I don't know what all is possible to do in this program so I don't want to have big ideas and not be able to achieve the final product. 

Week 5B

This week was all about narrowing down the idea for the Shari berries animation. I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how things would work, and  I didn't know how to get it to flow. Professor Pannifino told me that it would be a hard logo to animate but I decided to stick with it anyway. so at first, I began making a storyboard and I felt like I was lacking creativity. it was looking too basic so I decided to just research and see what Shari berries were about. I mainly learned that they are very professional and very high end so I knew that I would not be doing anything crazy, in order to stay true to their company. which lead me to my first storyboard.

This one looked a mess and my ideas were all over the place, I didn't know where I was going with the idea and was essentially just trying to make things move for the sake of moving. after showing this to my peers I dot the idea of the strawberry dropping down the screen into some chocolate. that's the idea that I'm going with in order to make this logo work.

Week 5A

This class we started by receiving the feedback on our last project. Some of the feed back I received was:

• That the colored backgrounds worked very well and flowed nicely. 
• That the font worked well for a serious quote. 
• The word transitions were effective.
• That the "r" in survive needed to be kerned. 

I did listen and I made the changes in after effects and fixed my spelling error and the new video looks better. 

Three Logos:

Shari's Berries: I decided to choose this one due to the script font and the strawberry. I feel like this company is overall very fun and gives a lot of elements to play with the animation process. I think the idea of having Sharis Berries spell out will be effective, also maybe if I play with the idea of strawberry being animated and the chocolate glistening could be fun also. 

Insomnia cookies: Insomnia Cookies is one of the most popular desert places in Philly offered to college students. I think that whats interesting is the fact that this logo has an interesting design to play with I like the idea that the cookie is shaped like a moon and that would be something interesting to play with.






Sea Suds: The last one that I decided to choose was Sea Suds a kids bath soap company that I created last year in vis com. The mascot is a cute little puffer fish that has a lot of possibilities to be animated. For example, I could have the bubbles floating and the puffer fish has flapping fins.

Week 4 Outside of class

After working on getting all the different words into after effects came and having all the transformations down I decided to work on a background for the video. I didn't know what I was going to do, but I knew I wanted something simple. So I eventually came up with the idea of fading colors and having them flow into each other. Once I came up with this idea I realized that I was not going to just find the stills on goggle so I had to make them myself in photoshop.

The technique I decided to go with was selecting a soft round brush set the opacity to 14% and then using an airbrush at 50%flow. I then got the image to the left by adding a  combo of orange, yellow, pink and light pink and playing with the opacity.

after getting that image instead of making others or going over the top with slightly different colors I decided to play with the hue and saturation. the most important thing was to take several and not just make a big jump. so I had three other images of variation.

Week 4B

This class we started on the final exercise which was making a video out of a chosen piece of text.after picking my quote last class I now spent all day putting it in after effects. knowing that I couldn't have anything to flash I decided to stick to the lines of things fading in and fading out. since Maya Angelou is so influential and a powerful speaker I didn't want to do anything too flashy. So sticking to something simple was the best and most effective way to translate her words. I still don't know what I'm going to do for the background but I did draw some inspiration from this image.

Story Boards: 

Week 4A

This class was spent getting the review of the rhythm excursive. I did volunteer and received some interesting feedback which was.

• To limit the size of my letters( due to the fact that they were so bold) 
• To slow down the movement a tad so that the word could come together for a longer period of time. 

This was helpful since I didn't know how to approach this project at first. I think that with some simple changes the video would be way more effective at showing the rhythm of the word.

The second part of the class was spent learning about the final exercise. This one will be focusing on combining all the elements to make one visual video. The subject of the video had to be a short cluster of words. For example, a conversation, a song or a quote. The main focus is to use foreshadowing and repetition. So picking a quote that rhymed or had a repetitive word would definitely be helpful. the quote that I chose was as follows:

The reason I chose to pick this quote was to not only reach the criteria but to pick something that I connected with on a personal level. I really love Maya Angelou and I find that all her quotes hold a deep significance. this is the one that I was able to connect with on a personal level and that will make the project more enjoyable.

Week 3 Outside of class

This week was about focusing on some of the moving elements in after effects. So since we had no class this week due to the weather, we were emailed an exercise to complete. This exercise was all about rhythm and to male the word move and loop. After looking at some of the examples, I decided right away that I didn't want to do anything too crazy. When making a one-word move I really didn't want to make the movements too busy. I felt like the most elaborate thing that I wanted to do with this project would be the typeface that I choose. I decided to go with GroBold a bolder and cartoon-like font in order to get the point across well, I knew I wanted something larger but not too big to the point of not having anything move around correctly.

Week 3B No Class

Week 3A

This week we did an exercise where we had to move shapes in after effects to a predetermined beat. It was an interesting exercise considering the fact that all we could work with was a circle,, square and a triangle. It really made me think about what I was trying to do and how I could move these shapes in different ways.
The most difficult shape to work with would be the circle. I think that without the dashed lines on the stroke, you would not be able to see the rotation very well. So once i added them the circle was able to come into play and rotate across the triangle

Week 2 outside of class

The most important thing to do this week outside of class was to improve my video. I already had all the textures in there and now I needed to improve the overall content and decide on a text that would match my content the best. So, I decided to go with a font that had some noticeable brush strokes but also had the readability that is required for such a fast-paced video. Since I wanted a frame rate that was rather fast I wanted to go with something that was bold enough to read, but I also wanted something with somewhat of a decorative element.

The next thing I wanted to change was the way my images were presented. I know that I couldn't have my images flying across the screen all crazy but I still wanted something to give them a little something to make it look less like a slide show.


I Decided to use flashes in order to make the video have more of a suspenseful feel. I feel that for the most part the flashes were effective and got my point across.

Week 2B

Today in class we went over some more tools to aid in the use of after effects. The main things I learned were different versions to render out to in order to save on the file size. By making your video slightly less quality you can save on the size plenty.  The main thing that prevents people from doing this is the fear of losing detail in the video, but I didn't really notice a difference. it was just maybe a slight change in some color values but nothing major. After the demo, we began working on translating our typed up dream into a video with images. The main twist on this project was that we could only use textures. I never would have imagined how hard it could be to put simple words into a texture, but it is actually pretty difficult. Apparently, at first, I missed the only using texture part so I had to switch some around. But overall I used some that I thought fit pretty well.

Some Textures Used 

 Monster: I decided to go with the texture of skin for the word monster in order to showcase the fact that the monster was a person. Also, I have never realized how scary an up-close view of human skin was until this project.

Mystery:  I went with a cracked glass texture for mystery since it holds so much suspense. When viewing the image one may begin to think why is the glass cracked, or how it got that way. I really wanted to go with an image that made people question what was going on within the image itself, something that made them look deeper into the texture.

Disbelief: The texture of water droplets is mainly to look into the dream itself. It is mainly to connect to the part of my dream where the fire department tries to destroy my evidence.

Panic: This is the texture of human body parts coming through a wall of some sort. I thought this would best represent the aspect of being trapped, and I know that is a point when people panic. I feel like this image alone gives me a person with anxiety a sense of panic.