After Effects

After effects is a program used in the Adobe suite that lets you put together animation, sequences and film. In the workshop we explored the basic concepts of it and how to do simple animation and also how to put together a sequence of stop motion images to form an animation.

At the bottom of the screen it is split up into two parts. The left hand part shows each of the separate files that have been placed into the animation, in this instance the song and 3 images. They each have a bar that they are in and carried onto, on the right hand side of the screen with each bar showing the various forms that the file comes under, for instance with an image only the effects you place on it and when it is visible within the time line are shown. The right side itself is a time line and a slider bar (red line) shows what time is being shown at the present point. To add effects or change the files imported click on the drop down arrow on the left hand side and select which options you would like to ply about with, ie for the music file i have selected audio levels and waveforms. This shows within the time line the waveform of the music which is helpful when trying to place the rest of the animation around it.

When choosing a background colour it is best to pick a bright noticeable one and also one that you are not going to be using within your animation. This is because the working area withing After Effects is bigger than the area that will appear in the final piece. This area is highlighted in the colour and like in the image above it shows up where nothing at that point in the time line is placed on it. It acts as a guide and also shows you if you have placed an image over the bounding area.

The line shown in the image is a piece of animation. After Effects allows you to pick up any type of image file including film and move it around the screen. The large squares at the start and end of the line are the 2 key frames and the circular ones on the line are the other frames. They key frames are where the image starts and ends and the frames are what After Effects adds in to create movement. They appear on the timeline as diamonds as shown below.

When bringing in images into After Effects you may want to bring in a few and use them as stop motion. However importing all these and then sorting out when they appear would be extremely time consuming and alot of effort. There is also a chance for human error. Therefore you can select the first image of the sequence (so long as the images are in the right order in a file) and when importing it click the sequence button you have turned off normally.