KIB105 week six exercise

Reflection
This week I worked with the curves effect, level effect, saturation and multi-mask layer in AE in order to create a composition which incorporated temporal graffiti. I animated the graffiti reveal and disappear on a wall. In order to achieve that, I used multi-mask layer as required. I found three graffiti pictures on Flickr first. They all have creative commons of course. I cut them off first and changed the layer mode to “Multiply” to achieve the stencil effect. By doing that, the graffiti could blend into the environment. However, they don’t look perfectly on the wall because of the different color, contrast and perspective. Some of them have too much color so I have to reduce their saturation by using the saturation tool (Effects>Color Corrections>Hue/saturation). And in order to change the light and contract of an image, I used curve to achieve that. Because “Multiply” mode will delete the color area between grey and white of the picture, I have to adjust the curve of the picture to change the color for this area to fit them into the background. And also make the black not too dark due to the reflection and refraction in the environment. I am familiar with Photoshop so these tools were easy for me to use in AE. Perspective is another question that I was facing. In the end, Corner Pan handled that problem perfectly. I don’t need to turn the layer to 3D mode because Corner Pan will create a prefect perspective for me. I used three different ways to animate the three graffiti. I created two masks for the first one and animated the second mask’s Mask Path to make the spray effect. I did about 15 masks for the second and try to animate the graffiti to reveal on the wall piece by piece. For the third I just animate directly on the ordinary mask.

Analysis
The effects of the animation are not obvious enough. This is caused by the speed of the animation and the control of the mask. I was a little confused when I made 15 layers for the second graffiti. I animated them at the same time and drag the key frames for each of them one by one. But once it’s done, it was hard to adjust later. That’s why I feel the animation for the second graffiti was a little bit stiff. That use of Corner Pan is very important in this exercise. Usually the perspective of the picture you found on the internet does not match the one for environment that exist in the project. Need to use Corner Pan to adjust it. The use of Corner pan in this exercise was ok. The use of curves effect, level effect, saturation was fine as well. You can’t see the edge of the images on the wall.

Understanding and Comprehension
Some skills I learned from this week are very important. The use of color correction is almost needed in every project. I think Corner Pan could be used in many situations. This tool is similar to the free transform tool in Photoshop. Both of them are very strong and useful. Multi-mask creates so many possibilities for animator. For example, moving handwritten animations, blubbering animation, water droplets, the growth of a seed and many other different techniques can be demonstrated through this technique.