car

for the car i used in the video i searched for a simple silhouette of a car, then because i am using a black background for my video i opened it in photoshop and changed it to white, i think the part with the car is my favourite part of the video

notes during making the video

just a screenshot of some of the notes i was taking during the making of the video, some changes i noticed i needed to make

evaluation

Overall i have really enjoyed this project and learnt a lot, i had always wanted to learn how to make my own kinetic typography videos and now i have bought the programs myself i will be able to make them whenever i want in the future. This method was very time consuming and if i had chosen to do a poster or something easier i would have finished a lot sooner than i did but i am glad i decided to try something a little more challenging and something i haven't done before, it was a good excuse to teach myself a new skill. there are a couple of things i would have done differently if i had to do the project over again though, for example the short clips of the band members playing their instruments took too long to cut out and put together in position and in the right order and since i have finished the video i found out about a new feature in after effects cs5 called a roto brush this enables you to select an area of a video clip, such as the artist and their instrument and then it will cut out the rest of the background on the video for you but not lose any of the movement of the parts you have selected. if i had known about this sooner it would have saved me a lot of time but i am happy with the messy effect that i created doing it myself. i would have also liked to experiment more with different backgrounds, including effects such as gradients and the use of different colours. but i think the simple black and white colour scheme i decided to use is very powerful so i am happy with my final choice. i might have even experimented with things such as shadows and light more if i'd had a bit more time, i also found out about a lot of pre programmed effects in the program that i didnt know about in time to use in my video some of these could probably help to make any future videos more interesting and exciting. I am really happy with the amount of things i have learnt during this project and i think that this is one of the best projects i have done mainly because it is something different that ive never done before, only downside is the amount of time it takes.

my final video

okay so here is my final video, i have gone back and made a few small changes from the last video i posted. i am really happy with the final outcome of this video and i think now i am becoming more familiar with this program i can do a lot more of this kind of thing in the future

motion blur and 3d enabled

 this is just a small image to explain what these 2 boxes are, all the text layers have these 2 boxes checked. the square symbol on the right is to show that the layer has 3d enabled, enabling 3d means you can change more things about the type, use different angles and it also allows the camera to control the layer, a layer that doesnt have 3d selected can't be affected by the camera. the button on the left enables motion blur, this is the blurriness that appears when something is moving, this makes the whole thing look a lot more effective and makes the movement look soo much better. 

typeface

 just incase you were wondering the typeface i have used for all the main text in this video is one i downloaded called savings bond, i wanted a chunky typeface that is easy to read when it is moving so after looking around for a while i settled on this one. also the chunkier and bigger the typeface is the better it is for the motion blur effect i have used in the video.

band members

 to make the short clips of the bands playing their instruments i used the images played one after another to create the effect of movement, i set each image to play for 2 frames one after another with the type being there for the whole length of the clip

i had to upload each image in to after effects so i could place them in the video where i wanted them and in order.

to create the images i needed i had to open the normal music video in after effects then for every single frame of the section i wanted i took a screenshot, so as you can see in the folders i took a lot of screenshots then to make them fit with my background i had to open each individual image in photoshop. then i went round with the lasso tool being careful to cut out a similar shape for each one then i removed the background image and made the background of each one black, then i changed the rest of each image a purple colour so that they were all the same. this was one of the most time consuming parts of the project because there were soo many and i had to do them all individually. I am very happy with how they turned out though and they have created just the effect i was looking for, i was going for a bit of a messy technique and didnt want all the images to be cut out perfectly so people could tell they were individual images not just a video clip

screenshots

 this first screenshot is the video rendering, compared to the istd videos this one rendered a lot faster, probably because there are a lot less files in this video and a lot less words.

 here is a zoomed out screenshot showing some of the layers and how when one starts another one might end this is how they are timed up with the music

 here is a picture that is more zoomed in giving you a better idea about how each word starts and finishes in time with the music and gives you an idea of the amount of layers, look at the scroll bar on the right this picture probably only shows about a quarter of the layers used for this video.

 in this video i grouped a lot of the layers together into seperate compositions within the main video. things such as the pictures of the band are in these layers and these layers act differently with the camera than the normal text layers.

here you can see a short section of the cameras actions, the dots show an action by the camera, they might represent things like position, scale or rotation. in this video i have used the y rotation because this is what gives the text the ability to move into other angles, this option is only available for 3d layers. i think that this is one of the best features of this program and when i do any future projects using after effects i intend to use this a lot more.

update

so after talking to mike the other day about my progress with both projects and showing him this video we were talking about the brief. the original brief says to make 2 examples of songs by the same artist but because this method takes 10 times longer than most other techniques and the fact that i'm not entering the competition i should only do one final video. this will mean i can spend more time on this one video making it better instead of doing the same thing twice and rushing ... i have also put all the other examples of my experiments on this blog. so i am going to use my remaining to time to go back and look at the main video i made and try to improve it