After Effects FTW!

I have to swallow a little humble pie, I guess. After slamming Adobe in my last post, how can I sing their praises now? Because, I downloaded After Effects, and I love it!

The coolest thing about After Effects is its usage of layers. Just like in Photoshop, layers can contain individual images. Best of all, each layer can have its own properties. So, for example, one layer can be fully transparent, and another layer can be fully opaque. Or, better yet, each layer can have varying levels of opacity. And, even betterer, these opacities can be set on a timeline, using keyframes and tweens. This is what makes Flash so cool, and is what has sold me so completely on After Effects.

Whilst playing around, I quickly realised that it is possible to film something, and then change an element of it and film it again, and then slide the opacities of the 2 layers in playback so that the altered element either appears or dissappears. This has led to me completely revising my original idea. Whilst I still love the comedy inherent in "Lee takes a photo of himself every second for 10 seconds!" I now plan to film sections of my house, or another house, or just random locations in Lincoln. The first filming will contain either myself or a more photogenic actor, and the second filming will be just the background. Then I can fade the person into or out of the footage. Do this 3 or 4 times, and then end with a text scrren saying "I miss you." Provided I can get the right music, this could be extremely effective.

Perhaps building an entire movie around one gimmick/effect is not the best thing to do. However, when the entire movie lasts only 10 seconds, then this becomes an extrememly powerful tool. I am aiming for 'spooky' which leads to 'moving', and I am pretty sure that I can acheive this.

This leaves me with one major problem remaining. Who to use as the 'ghost'? The obvious person is myself, but this is not necessarily the best solution from a dramatic standpoint. An actual actor would clearly be superior, as even though they will be on-screen for mere seconds, they will still have to convey happiness in that short time. Now, I do not know how good an actor I am, so perhaps I should try and find somebody else for this part. Also, as non-PC as this sounds, I do want the actor to be somebody good looking. Possibly even someone visually striking, as this might be the best way to get the emotional pull that I want. Maybe even use a child, although that might upset people. Which, let's face it, is quite an accomplishment in a 10-second movie!

Lots to think about!

Adobe Premiere = hassle!

Seriously, Adobe, sort it out. This is easily the least user-friendly of all your products, and that is saying something! It won't even let you open it until you give the file you plan to make a location and name. WTF? I just wanted to play about a bit, and see the menus. It was the first time I opened the damn thing, and I know you can see that kind of information. Why not offer me some kind of tour on my first open, or at the very least give me a 'Tip of the day'? Sheesh.

Having overcome this hurdle, I have to say that I am not that impressed. Sure, it's Adobe, and no doubt there is some nice stuff tucked away in there. But, to all intents and purposes, Premiere is Windows Movie Maker in a business suit. And, since most of the students already have Movie Maker, it would probably have made sense to mention to us that we could edit our movies with that. The obsession with Adobe is somewhat worrying. I GET that we will need to be au fait with more industry-standard software, and I GET that they can offer a lot more flexibility than the standard Microsoft stuff, but personally I feel that people learn more when forced to overcome limitations than they ever do when being handed a massive sandbox. Add to this the consideration that we either get the Adobe stuff for 30 days, or pay a fortune for them, whereas there is an abundance of free software available, and it all adds up to a bit of a pain in the bum. </rant>

W00T!

This morning, in my inbox :

Lee Weedall,

The batch of 4 files uploaded on 2006-11-15 09:36:54
has been processed by our Image Approval & Moderation team. Below you
will find the status of the files in this upload:


Approved Photos
----------------------------------------------------------------
The following files have been approved and will be scheduled
to be added to the website on the next update (within 24 hours).

1001225 Bridge

1001226 Tracks

1001258 Stag
Comments: do not use maker name pls.

1001362 Hull



Thank you for your help with BigStockPhoto.com!

BigStockPhoto Approvers

That'll do nicely!

We have our second assignment. "Create a 10 second movie." At first this sounds ridiculously easy, but a little thought makes you realise it is actually quite tricky. To compile anything with meaning into 10 seconds is not particularly simple. The onvious answer is just to go with some comedy, as 10 seconds is rather a long time for a good slapstick gag.

The problem, and this is actually something I am not too pleased about, is that according to the criterion reference grid for the assignment, we appear to be being graded more on our usage of audio than we are on the imagery in the movie. In fact, we can not get a first-class grade unless we use audio from multiple sources, and synchronise it to the on-screen action. Now, whilst this is far from an impossible task, I actually find it somewhat limiting. I mean, in a 10 second movie, it may be desirable to have little or even NO soundtrack! A lack of sound can tell as much of a story as the sound itself can.

Anyway, having thought about it, an idea suddenly popped into my mind. In our first Creative Technologies lecture, John showed us the video of "Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years." If ever anything was crying out for subversion, it is something like that. So, my plan is to make "Lee takes a photo of himself every second for 10 seconds." I have already thought of two or three ways to introduce a little more humour inside the 10 pictures, but have yet to decide on the final storyboard.

All I need to do is somehow come up with my own piano piece, so that I can upload it anywhere. Either that, or discover what the original piano piece used in the movie is, and somehow obtain the permission to use that. This would obviously be ideal, as it would be instantly recognisable to anyone who saw the original movie, but all I really need to do is have something that sounds a little bit like it. As long as I capture the feel, then hopefully it will carry across and remind people. Let's face it, the entire lecture theatre will have seen the original, and it is them who will be seeing my finished movie.

Filming should be straightforward, and I am lucky enough that I won't have to struggle to borrow one of the University provided cameras. Filming this idea should literally take no more than 10 seconds, possibly a minute or so if I do multiple takes. It is how I fill in the gaps between the pictures that will ultimately take up all the time, and will ultimately determine my final grade, I believe.

All at sea!

For the final pic, I took a look through my boat pictures. The one that I took of the underside of the hull was clearly the most interesting, as you rarely get to see boats from that angle. My idea was hopefully to trick the viewer into thinking the picture was taken at sea, rather than from just on the other side of a fence near a boatyard, several yards from the harbour.



In order to make it look like it was taken at sea, I first off had to adjust the colour balance. I wanted the picture to be more blue, basically, which would hopefully make it look like it was taken from a lifeboat or something else. It took several attempts, moving the balance bar a pixel or so at a time, but I think I managed it! (Seriously, sometimes there is literally no other way to get the picture you want than just changing it until it looks the way you planned.) Also, since the whole thing has been brightened, and the contrast increased, then I think I have done a good job of making this look like a sea-going vessel in mid-August, rather than a grounded yacht in early November. The contrast adjustment certainly improves the looks of the clouds, in my opinion.



All in all, I think that the main thing I have learned from this exercise, apart from getting a new camera that actually holds its memory cards properly, is that the best way to go about this kind of thing is to actually have a good photo to start with. Photoshop may well be an extremely useful tool, but it has its limitations.

A British classic.

The Triumph Stag is one of the all-time classic British cars. Whilst not quite as iconic as, say, the E-type Jag, it is still an instantly recognisable roadster that immediately puts certain images into your mind. When I was given this assignment, I knew I had to get something like that. Now, the stag in the picture belongs to my fiancee's stepfather, and he was more than happy to let me take some photos of it.



For this one, what I actually wanted to do was to make the background grayscale, and just have the bright yellow of the car itself stand out against that. Seems like Photoshop can't handle that idea, as you are unable to have a single layer in grayscale. If one is, all are. Oh well, no worries. So, instead, I chose to make the background as blurry and old looking as possible, whilst still trying to maintain some kind of hint of modern. By very carefully selecting all round the car, I was then able to put it into a layer all of its own. Then, I went back to the original background layer, and applied gaussian blur filter. This gave a nice effect, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for. The next best thing to grayscale would be some kind of sepia tone, or just adding a lot of noise. The idea being that I wanted anything that was not the car to look old, with a shiny car standing out against this dull background. Again, I also had to crop in to the car, as too much background tends to be a bad thing on the site. In this case, I think this is a pity, as the concept of the photo would possibly stand a bit more background.



That has ended up being a touch overdone, and I may well go back afterwards and do some more work on it.

Picture 2!

The train on the tracks. Now, the whole reason I went up on that bridge was to take stuff like this.



I was looking for something based on the tracks going off into the distance. Figuring I could frame it nicely, when the train came into shot. I realised that this actually improved the shot somwhat, as it gave a focus, and linked it more closely to 'Transport & Technology' than just a set of train trakcs on their own. I feel the unedited picture sets a fairly standard urban scene.

In editing this pic, my intention was still to frame the tracks, as originally intended. So, again, rotate the pic, and crop it into it. Without the train on it at all looked fairly good, but there was just something about the train that made me want to include it. Again, the pic was sharpened, and I played with the levels to maximise the brightness. A small crop made a pretty large difference, as the tracks really do grab the eye on the edited pic.



Standard stuff, I guess, but I happen to like it. Again, I think I did a pretty good job on the composition of the picture in the first instance, which meant not doing an awful lot to it before uploading.

Nightmare!

All my photos of planes seemingly never took. I did get a 'Memory card error' message on the last couple of pics I took yesterday, but I never noticed it before then. I guess the card needed reseating, as I have now done that and it seems to be working just fine. It's not the end of the world, or even the end of my own world, but I really could have done without it.

So, out of the 40 or so pics I took, only 30 or so were actually there to work with. So, I looked through what I had, and selected some that I could mess with. My plan was originally to do a boatm a plane, a car, and a train, thus matching 'Transport' perfectly. Sadly, this wasn't to be. However, I did manage to stick to one car, one boat, and one train. My plane was replaced by a bridge, which whilst only kinda matching the theme, matched enough for my liking at such a short notice.

I have decided to post about each pic seperately. This way, I can talk about them in slightly more depth, and nobody has to endure a ridiculously long blog post from me. First, I'll talk about the last minute replacement, the bridge.

The original image was actually the only shot I got of the bridge, as this was where I noticed the 'memory card error'. Originally, I went up there to get a bird's eye view of the tracks underneath, and it wasn't until I was up there that it occured to me that this was something that might be useable. I thought that it could be used to indicate 'connections', or 'building bridges' in some business kind of way, as I had already realised that business images were the best sellers on the site. This was mainly why I wanted to add the '& Technology' to the 'Transport' theme the group chose. Obviously, it would serve two purposes. First, it would make the theme broader, and secondly it would improve any chances we had of getting stuff accepted, and possibly even sold.

So, I placed myself down at floor level, and then JUST as I was about to take my shot, a woman walked into sight. She was carrying some shopping, too, which meant that I had to wait a good couple of minutes for her to walk across. Then, just as she passed me, a man came into shot from behind me. I ended up waiting nearly ten minutes to take the shot!

I ended up with this :



which is a firly striking image, or at least I think so. Editing it proved fairly straightforward. First off, I had to roate the picture, obviously. Then, crop into it a little, to remove the cathedral, and brighten it a little. Adding just the tiniest hint of contrast made the bridge stand out, and naturally I sharpened it.

The finished result is here :



Whilst I possibly could have done a little more to bring out the colour, I think the fact that it was a failry grey day did not help me. Also, the picture was mostly unplanned. Overall, I am happy with the result, as I think the concept of the image carries it quite well.

The eve of destruction!

Or, more accurately, the day before the assignment is due.

I have finally taken the last of my pictures. Well, I say that, but I still fully expect to take several more this afternoon. I'm like that ; I get ideas at innapropriate times. This afternoon, I plan to select the best from my existing images, and edit the ones I shall be uploading to the site. All nicely in time for the limit, even if it means a slightly later bedtime than I would like tonight. So be it. That'll teach me to get stuff done earlier in future.

I am supposed to be able to show an understanding of the types of files that are available, and disucss why I would or would not use them. Well, that is simple. Since my camera takes photos in the jpeg format, and since BigStockPhoto asks us to upload images in the jpeg format, then it's a no-brainer. Which is fair enough, because the format itself is good at lower compression rates. But, personally, I would use Portable Network Graphics, or png. Superior compression, without loss? It is a shame that BigStockPhoto does not accept the format yet.

The only other format worth considering would be bmp. Now, I have always been a fan of the format, purely because of the superior quality, but it does lead to problems with editing. And, since it is very much a Windows proprietary format, then you may well find your image unable to be used by some potential customers. And as for gif ... well, let's just say that a 255 colour limit simply does not bear thinking about! The images themselves would be FAR too blocky!

So, jpeg, whilst not the ideal format, is good enough. Hopefully my stock of photos has some that are interesting enough to upload!