90 Days of Motion Graphics (Project 4)

Published 10. February 2015.

This project drifts away from motion graphics towards visual effects. I've been participating and helping with an indie film over the past several months, including editing. We're working our way through that but there's also a huge amount of VFX work to be done with it being a sci-fi film.

So this project of learning motion graphics and After Effects coincides nicely with that, and presents a fantastic challenge to apply the skills to something more real.

With that, I worked on creating a shockwave effect, based on this tutorial. I doubt I'll use it specifically for the movie, but the techniques have potential applications for sci-fi effects.

Project 4

Time to Complete: 2:30 hours over two days.

 

After Effects, from a learning perspective, is an odd tool/skillset. In many other programs learning the fundamentals of the interface and how to create an efficient workflow is often much of the actual challenge. All the extra tools, effects, filters, and such are just bonuses to be learned over time.

But with After Effects it seems that a critical piece of being good at it is understanding the bevy of effects you have to work with, how to manipulate them to achieve a desired effect, and how to combine effects together to create compositions with greatly magnified complexity.

This project is a perfect example. The entire thing is built around one effect, Fractal Noise (anyone who's used Photoshop a bit would recognize them as Render Clouds). Animating the fractal and then applying a Polar Coordinates effect to transform a linear effect into a radial one...

...and then continuing to stack on effects, duplicate versions of the shockwave; layering on more and more complexity with each pass.

There's a unexpectedly large room for creativity here even in the subtle modifications on what are basically generative algorithms. I'm quite curious to see how I'll be able to push creative boundries within this frame as time goes on.