Design Production for Digital//Silent Movie//Adobe Workshop I.

Despite attending the Adobe After Effects first workshop when it was initally given and drafting up a post of screenshots and content from the session, going back over my blog today, I have been unable to find the original source. Therefore, for the record, and a personal reminder before I immerse myself in designing tomorrow, I decided to recap the session to record what I learnt from my first interaction with the software programme.

Opening up the Adobe After Effects software, you are greeted with a welcome page with composition/page layout options, tips of the day, etc. In this case, we cross out of the page to go directly onto the opening format screen display.

To create a new composition:

Composition > New Composition

From this point, we can go on to specify screen dimensions/colour of our background, frame rate setting/resolution, etc.

Choosing a black background with the PAL D1/DV Widescreen Square Pixel resolution, this is the screen that appears- colours and other settings can be chosen accordingly

(as shown in the screenshot above).

To create a solid shape:

Layer > New... > Solid

Select appropriate width and height of the solid shape (can be manually entered by double clicking and highlighting a box for the numbers, or an arrow drag across function can also be used), and choose your colour by double clicking inside the box, or using the colour picker accordingly.

The solid can then me manipulated in height or width, or moved around the screen accordingly.

The duration of time that solid is seen on the screen in the motion graphic design, and the total elapsed time of the complete motion graphic animation can be determined by sliding the red timeline bar in the work space or the current time indicator bar across by manually sliding along to the specific time requirements.

Multiple solid shapes can be adding by repeating the initial solid layer toolbar drop down menu- size and colour are determined and manipulated in the same way.

To adjust the quality of the images/solid layers shown on screen- select the resolution/down sample factor pop up (next to the RGB colour model symbol). Working on a lower resolution will ensure that large files are more manageable to work with, and the software runs more fluidly (such as when you can select 'Overview Print' option- to opt in or out in Adobe InDesign print production software).

To select transform options for the solid layers, click on the drop down menu arrow(s) in the 

project workspace area. 

If you, again, select the arrow drop down option from the transform menu, more options become available- here, we have selected the 'P' position option, which will allow us to control the path in which the solid layer objects are moved in the motion graphic path.

 

Move around the solid layer objects in accordance to the timeline, and mark significant key frames by clicking the timer button to the left of 'position' in the project workspace- the same is applied for other options such as scale, opacity, etc.

Selecting the tilda key on bottom-left corner of the keyboard '~' allows you to look at the workspace, key frames and solid layers more closely in a large-scale view.

Clicking on anchor points with the pen tools makes curved lines straight- and also, by dragging the anchor points, you can make Bezier curves, as you would in the Adobe Illustrator software.

By dragging the cursor over all of the key frames and selecting Alt, all of the key frames can be moved simultaneously over time in the motion graphics sequence. 

To render your sequence:

Composition > Add to render queue

Output Module > H.264 (most suited for vimeo/blog uploads) 

And select where you want your file to be saved- in my case on my desktop (as can be seen in the screenshot below). Files will be saved as a Quick Time Player file.