Mountain Adventure - After Effects.

To start the lesson like the previous weeks we were told to download a zip file off of the UCA website and put it onto our desktop. We had to make  a folder structure like we have been doing for the last could of weeks. I then opened the sip file and found these files:

Due to the this blogger site being rather restricted i can not upload a photoshop file which was included in the zip file. So i will take a screen shot of the quad bike Photoshop file. You can see on the right had side of the print screen that there are three layers, one being the base of the quad bike with the character on top, the second layer is a tyre and so is the third.

Once the files are open we were told to import the files to After effects which is simple, however for the photoshop file about you have to import the file as footage rather then a jpeg file for instance, and you have to tick 'retain layers' so AfterEffects can tell that it has three different layers, meaning that we can freely animate the layers. The first task in AfterEffects was to animate the wheels moving around, the most important thing is to check the the centre point is in fact in the centre, as then we go to animate the rotation then the rotation will not be on centre - and it would stop it from looking like a wheel. To animate the wheel was pretty simple. We simple key framed the first position of the wheel, I then moved the time curser to 1 second on duration and then used the rotation tool to rotate the wheel 360 degrees. Due to how AfterEffects has been made the programme will animate the change between each key frame and therefore it will rotate the wheel one whole rotation within one second. Once I had done that, it was a lot to do with trial and amending to make it look fast enough, but not too fast that it looks like a Formula 1 racing car. Once i had got it moving at a pace i was happy with i repeated the key frame a further 9 times as the duration of the clip was to be 10 seconds long. Alternatively i could do one key frame at the end of the animation and type in 10 rotations at 360 degrees, but i decided to do separate key frames as i means that i have more control. I repeated this to both of the wheels.

I played the wheels and they looked good however, for me a quad bike isn't smooth, its bumpy and jerky, so i decided to animate the body of the quad bike moving up and down against the tyres. I did this by key framing the quad bike in three positions, one - the original position, two - raise the body from the original position and three - lower the body from the original position. I initially made the key frames play 1,2,1,3,1,2,1,3,1,2,1,3 etc so that the movements went smooth from each position, however i wanted to make it look bumpier so i animated it 1,3,2,3,1,3,2,1,3,2,3,1 in a random sequence and it looked much better. Once i had done that i saved the project and exported it as a film to my desktop. Exporting now means that there will be less open files when i go to make the backgrounds for the Mountain adventure clip, this will hopefully fasten play back times and make rendering the work later quicker and easier.