3 Takeaways from Day 2 at #NABshow
1. Motion Graphics Artists are Patient ✨Magicians✨
As part of Post|Production World (#PPW) a paid program at #NABShow, Eran Stern walked us through a series of promos and commercials he edited in After Effects. He showed us the power of AE plugins and free effects to save time and make promos and commercials stand out. Here is a list of effects he covered in his class:
- Primatte Keyer by Red Giant. Great for creating accurate green screen & blue screen composites, especially when actors are wearing colors, such as yellow.
- Light Wrap by Digital Anarchy. Wraps light around the actors to give it a more realistic look when compositing.
- Colorista by Red Giant. It has it's own built in keyer that you can use to isolate and enhance colors after you process your key.
- FL Out of Focus by Frischluft. Enables users to apply realistic camera blurs to composited backgrounds.
- YY_Ramp+ [FREE or name your price] by Andrew Yang, aescripts + aeplugins. You can add color casts to your footage to match your scene.
- Optical Flares 2 by Video CoPilot. Let's you simulate expensive lenses.
- Sweet for After Effects by aesweets. Let's you create sweet vector animations, like clouds and splashes.
Apply these effects carefully to your videos and remember, it takes time, there are no shortcuts. A simple 3-second shot that involves tracking and compositing can take up to 16 hours. Also, to save time, remember ask for the final audio mix before you add VFX -- that way you can animate effects to the soundtrack. Overall, be kind to your motion graphics artists, they are really patient magicians!
2. You can make complex animations simple with a little creativity!
During his session, "Motion Graphics for Non-Fiction Storytellers," Paul Murphy showed us how he was able to turn a flat map into a sphere using a the CC Sphere effect. He also showed us that he learned how to turn a 100+ layer bar graph animation into a simple 5 layer composition simply by adding and key-framing a "Repeater" effect. No need to make a new shape layer for each bar in the graph, just make one and repeat!
3. Cinemagraphs or Animated Photographs are a new hot commodity!
Chris Converse blew us away with his ability to bring still photographs to life through the power of After Effects. Using the Fractal Noise effect in After Effects and simple masks, he was able to how us how he could make still water appear like it was moving or waving. Also, he demoed how you can use CC Light Burst to animate sun light-rays through an image. You can really be innovative! I'll ask Chris if he has any free tutorials I can share with you, if not, I'll have to make one myself! Bringing life to stills is very popular and many clients will hire you for this type of product. Below is a tutorial I made on how to make a cinemagraph from a video within Premiere Pro, you can download the footage and follow along.