KIB105 week five exercise

Reflection
In this week, we start working with text and digital audio. The requirement of the exercise is to make a composition in After Effect (AE) exploring the relationships between 2D text and digital audio. But the 2D texts were not created in Photoshop (PS). They need to be directly created in AE. The text tool in AE is quite like the one in PS. click the tool and click the scene it will allow people to type text on it. And it is very convenient to adjust size and font later. Text could be seen as a layer in AE. It also can be animated by changing the transform of it (position, scale, rotation and opacity). AE also has a very strong function. It stores a lots of pre-define text animations. I can just drag the icon into the text layer need to be animated. I can also change the length of the animation by dragging the key frame. These animations could be easily found under Effect&Presents. They are in Effect&Presents>Animation Presets>Tex>animate in and animate out. Animate in means animate the text to appear on the scene. Animate out is animation that makes the text disappear. But you can’t see these effects in AE. You have to check them in Adobe Bridge by clicking right mouse on Effect&Presents, and choose browse presents. There are about 30 choices. It is very useful. Another very important aspect I learned from this exercise is the use of 3D camera in AE. It is a very strong function. It was hard to understand at the first place. By turning the layer into 3D mode, it will have new attribute-Z axes. 3D camera could also look though the scene from a 360 degree perspective. By using this function, a lot of possibility can be achieved. I could make the camera moving around the scene or I could make the text layers moving themselves in 3D mode. I chose to use top view when I was using 3D camera. This view provides a clear view of the distance between each layers and the distance between layers and camera. Animate the text to support the digital audio is another big challenge in this exercise. I wouldn’t type every word I heard from the man’s speech in the audio and animate them as a subtitle. I will just pick up the key words in the speech and animate them. Timing is key aspect to control in this exercise.

Analysis
I felt the control of 3D camera is at the elementary level. Really need to do more exercise about it because I plan to do my first assessment with 3D camera. Some key words are not strong enough to push the narration. The animation is not very smooth and the animation itself is a bit boring. The combination of animation is not abundant. I had three words travel from the same direction. I thought the echo will be strong but it turns out a bit boring. I chose to pick up the key words from the speech in the audio. But sometime the key words are not strong enough to highlight the sentence and push the narration. So I typed some longer sentences to support the audio in the end of it. I wanted to make some change between the lengths of texts. I felt this will increase the richness of the video.

Understanding and Comprehension
This exercise is a very important one. I not only learned how to make a video to support an audio resource but also get to know the 3D camera in AE. Both of them will take very important roles in my first assessment and future studies. After the exercise I realized that rhythm of the video is very important. If you are making a 20-30 second video, you can’t make a video with rapid rhythm from the beginning to the end. There needs to be couple seconds slow for the audience to break and memory what they have seen. I think this is very important for every video I am going to make in the future.