504 - Compositing

Here are my favourite scenes that I composited (Ducky and Olivia did the character animation, I did everything else):

Flashcards/Intro Scenes:

Victoria's Riflebird:

King Bird:

Greater Bird:

Abstract/End Section (Olivia's shape animation, Ducky's character animation):

Here are some of the things I did in compositing for the bulk of the scenes:

• Colour corrected the bird to match with the environment
• Colour corrected the BG, adjusting saturation levels
• Compositing texture overlay on bird
• Animating each layer's sway movement for depth
• Blur any FG elements if there are any
• For 2 scenes I added a slight blur on the branch to bring focus to the bird
• Add camera movements depending on the scene
• If the scene is a closeup, blur the BG and resize it
• Reposition bird and BG comp for the final composition
• Add camera sway to final scene
• For riflebird scenes - created the iridescent effect using the same process as the iridescent test

I found this part really enjoyable and fairly straightforward as I had done most of the planning for it with the layouts. This was mostly about making sure there was consistency for everything, and just tweaking elements to make the scene look good. 

Occasionally I ran into a problem with the character animation either not lining up or not being the right size, but with those I resized the actual animation and repositioned them so that they fit ok. One area where there was a problem was with the king bird's colouring. That was coloured with a gap where the branch was covering the wing, however it wasn't done perfectly so you could see the edges. In future it would be better for me to ask the animators to colour the whole bird, and if there is an area that needs hiding I can mask it in post.

I'm really happy with how these scenes turned out - I definitely think a little bit of motion makes a scene feel so much more alive - and I learnt a lot about process and workflow. I feel like I'm getting a lot more comfortable with After Effects and problem solving with it.

For the Abstract scene, I played around with different effects but ended up just settling with a glow and increasing the saturation. I also added a ghost image to it by duplicating the animation, moving it to play a frame behind the original and lowering the opacity. I liked this effect as it made the animation feel more otherworldly and softer. Finally for this scene, I composited the bird animation and then transitioned between them with a quick fade.

There was minimal compositing with this scene, however I think it still makes it seem more polished.

The final scenes are the intro/flashcard scenes. These were definitely the biggest and most headache inducing scenes to composite and animate. 

The opening scene wasn't too difficult, but I originally tried using 3D layers and a camera for it to automatically create the parallax zoom in effect, however I couldn't get this to work - it's something to learn later. Instead, I faked the parallax by keyframing each forest layer. I also keyframed the mist to move downwards to make it seem more dynamic too. I think this turned out really good, although I'm not sure if it looks New Guinea enough, as the colours are less bright and more bluey. I think I went overboard on the atmospheric perspective on the painting stage.

The king bird intro and flashcard was the first one I composited:

• The camera movement and main animation part of it wasn't too complicated, it was just like any other scene but with a more in depth camera movement. Again, I faked the parallax by just moving the FG layer down quicker than the others.
• When it came to the flashcard, it was hard to do mainly because I needed to use the main scene however if I zoomed into that then it would be too blurry for the flashcard, so I had to use a different asset and cut between the two This ended up being very finnicky and I spent a lot of time manually working around problems and tweaking it till I got it to look right. In addition, the main scene file was much much larger than 1920x1080 because of the camera movement, therefore it was cumbersome to get the zoom right.
• Because of the cut between the original scene and the new bird asset, I had to work between compositions and it just became very confusing and time consuming, however I'm pretty happy with the end result
• For the actual flashcard movement, I used these 2 videos as my main inspiration and reference:

And the beginning of this video:

• I really liked the black bars coming in, and doing this would create that strip effect for which I could use the BG from the scene but blurred
• I also noticed that the flashcards looked interesting because there was always a bit of movement. With the borderlands intros, all of the text and assets were moving. The main movement was a slow increase in size, but there was also rotation and some moved across the screen slightly
• Finally, I also noticed that what made the movements effective was contrast. They shouldn't move in the same direction, they should react and bounce off each other to make it visually appealing
• I tried to incoporate all these things in my flashcards, and I think it turned out pretty successful. I think they're very snappy and visually engaging, and the slow movement works really well
• I do think that the info text should have been all caps, as currently it looks a bit out of place and not contrasty enough, however I don't think it is too bad.
• I found the rifle bird scene the hardest as I just couldn't get that zoom right, I think it looks a bit off and I'm not sure whether that's becuase of the direction of the squash of the animation before popping up, or if it's because the positioning of the zoom is misalligned. Either way it's very quick so not too noticeable.
• The greater flashcard was definitely the easiest, as the zoom was actually part of the animation and I didn't have to manually do it (except for the BG). In the future, I think planning for these zooms more extensively would have benefitted me, and would also make them a lot cleaner.

Overall, I'm really happy with these. I think the intro and flashcards of the King bird and Greater bird are my favourite scenes from the film. I found this kind of motion graphics really enjoyable but I recognise that I'm a complete beginner with it, so I may learn more and try and get better at it - especially about animating text properly too.