This was my last assignment for GLR, that wasn't an exam. Our teacher thought it would be a fun idea to give us
a license in an Adobe software. He choose for After Effects.
This meant I had to 'learn' everything about After Effects. Think about Masking, colour grading and lighting.
Each week we'd make another animation related to After Effects and a new thing to learn.
My first animation was to make the lights flikker on a picture that was handed to us. On the picture it had
to say "Eat at Katy's"
This wasn't so hard to do since you could use a lighting effect on each lightbulb and let the light shine
for ... seconds as you'd like. However, the animation should be 3 seconds long. You were free to do anything
else as long as the lightbulbs shine and the text "Eat at Katy's" was visible.
With the next project coming up we had to make 3 principles of animating. Think about Slow in - slow out,
exaggerated and Squash - stretch.
Our teacher wouldn't let us choose because that might mean that everybody would do the same three. Instead he'd
make 4 groups and in each group you'd get 3 animation principles you had to make. I got Exaggerated,
solid-drawing and slow in - slow out.
Okay, so I got the principles. Now I needed something to show those principles with.
I choose to make a cute elephant that you might recognize from my zoetrope. For this I needed to use Adobe
Illustrator to make the character. And then I could start in Adobe After Effects to make the elephant move.
I choose to do an elephant because I could use his trunk very well with the exaggerated one. And you could
see the slow in - slow out as well. However, I didn't really understand how to make the solid drawing and I
believe I still did it wrong so I don't know how I should've done it but as for back then, I used to
Illustrator file and gave the elephant only outlines.
For the week after that we had to make a VJ Clip.
A VJ Clip is basically a seamless loop. Only this time it's in 2D instead of 3D. I made an
Illustrator
file for my object to move in. I now realise what I did wasn't a real VJ Clip, but I can't change it
now.
Anyway, I found a copyright free song and added that to my AE. With the beats of this song I would
let
the circles etc rotate or reposition or do anything to make this interesting. I did this bbecause I
got
inspired by those music videos you'd see on Youtube when it's usually copyright free. Because that
would
also respond to the beats.
The next assignment was about masking.
Masking is something I already knew and that made this weeks assignment a lot easier to do.
For this weeks project I had to use my full name, aand something I love. And the idea was that the
thing I
love (in my case Marvel) will mask/ hover over my name. And then it'd loop over again.
Final week before we got our ACA exam we'd colour grade an existing video.
The idea was to make the video colours more warm. You could grade the video colours in an effect. And
even
adjust those already made gradings more to your liking.
Even tho the assignment was easy, I wanted to add something to it. And so I kind of made a lyric video
from the
song A Thousand Years sang by Christina Perri. I didn't do the entire song just a small bit in the
beginning. I
wanted to do this because I used to watch a lot of those Youtube edits from Marvel characters and they
sometimes
add the lyrics and that looks really cool. So I wanted to try that as well.
After getting into After Effects for 6 weeks straight we had to do the ACA Exam. This was done in the 2018
version. The exam was organized by Certiport and was just get all the correct answers within the hour.
Afterwards you'd get to see the score, getting higher then 710 points meant you had passed. Each question was 10
points.
In my "Spark" page I'll talk with more detail about the project, in Dutch.
In "All of them" you'll go to a Youtube video from my channel where I show all the end results from ACA.
In "Playlist" you'll also go to my Youtube Channel but you'll see my entire playlist with making offs, end
results, and in between.
In "Story Highlights" you'll go to my work Instagram and specifically go to a story highlight about ACA.