July 02, 2005

Room With A View

While authoring my next Virtual Training Company tutorial, I created content that shows how I accomplish various effects. This is a twelve-second clip that I created while teaching myself some 3D Lighting and Material techniques that are specific to After Effects. It does 3D, but you have to work at it to get acceptable results. This is easily the most sophisticated “postcards in space” 3D Model that I have generated in After Effects.

Posted by Nathan Dickson at 09:40 PM | Comments (0)

June 10, 2005

Jumping Heads

This is definitely a weird one. It was inspired by some After Effects Expressions that I was tinkering with yesterday, which caused me to do some more investigation. After doing some studying at www.motionscript.com, everything “clicked” and I was well on my way to creating this Frankenstein of a movie.

Quicktime is required

Posted by Nathan Dickson at 01:46 AM | Comments (1)

June 06, 2005

Big Brain Scanner

By popular demand, a high-quality version of the NathansBrain.com Brain Scanner. If you would like to know more about how this animation was created, you can either click on the brain scanner graphic at the top of this page or you can visit this link.

Posted by Nathan Dickson at 09:58 PM | Comments (0)

June 05, 2005

Magic Pictures

I composited this movie in Adobe After Effects, using several advanced techniques: — Chroma Keying — Luma Matting — CompSize Overset — Corner Stretching — Motion Tracking — Corner Pinning — Level Changes — Color Correction

It was inspired by the Hewlett-Packard “Pictures of your Momma” commercials. When you watch it, you’re probably going to remark, “Hey, your movie was only six seconds long! Where’s the rest of it?” That’s all there is, but it’s still pretty cool.

I will be including the tutorial movies necessary to learn all of these techniques in my up-and-coming Adobe After Effects 6.5 Tutorial, which should be available from The Virtual Training Company by August 1, 2005.

Quicktime is required

Posted by Nathan Dickson at 08:29 PM | Comments (0)

May 26, 2005

Butterflies

This is my latest creation. The background is stock footage kindly supplied by the good folks at Artbeats. The flying butterflies are a complete construction from the ground up, using my own JavaScript code within Adobe After Effects.

I created this one minute clip as a result of attempting to author a decent tutorial for VTC on After Effects 6.5 Advanced. This movie is used to explain the wiggle function as well as be the vehicle for explaining many interesting things about advanced 3D graphics within After Effects. Quicktime is required

Posted by Nathan Dickson at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)

May 03, 2005

How did she do that?

You may have already been sent this as an email attachment or as a link to a web site with the video, but here it is for your enjoyment. Even though the footage seems authentic, I’ll give you three guesses as to why, in actuality, it’s a fake.

Quicktime is required

Posted by Nathan Dickson at 08:04 AM | Comments (0)

April 23, 2005

Brain Scanner

It’s difficult to miss the Brain Scanner animated GIF (pronounced JIFF for those of you who until now have pronounced the acronym incorrectly). This was created in After Effects 6.5 Pro (hereafter referred to as “AE”) using several tricks.

First of all, I grabbed a picture of an authentic human brain from somewhere out in the ether (Google), brought it into AE and applied the Colorama Effect to it. Colorama has the fantastic ability to remap gray values to many interesting color palettes and even allows you to animate the palettes. This is an old trick in computer graphics and it’s nice to be able to do it in AE.

Secondly, I created a Mask around the brain image and used the mask to create an Alpha Channel for the Brain.

Then I brought the color-animated and alpha-channeled brain composition into another composition where I added the Advanced Lightning effect.

The Advanced Lightning effect is quite beautiful, as you can see, and allows you to use the Alpha Channel of the layer to which you apply it to “teach” the lightning where to travel as it were. This is why the lightning seems to wrap itself around the edges of the Brain as it seeks its way from point A to point B. The lightning effect complements the evolving solarized blue color changes of the brain itself.

The last step was to render the animation in high quality and bring it through Adobe ImageReady CS, which has the fantastic ability of turning a Quicktime Movie into a well-compressed Animated GIF for posting.

For those of you who have a copy of After Effects 6.5 Pro (or if you’ve downloaded the 30-day Demo from Adobe’s Website), you can inspect the source documents to see exactly how this animation was constructed.

Posted by Nathan Dickson at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2005

After Effects 6.5 Advanced

Well, I've begun work on my next VTC Tutorial. To prepare, I've been cramming my brain with as much esoteric AE material as it can tolerate. I think my gray matter fell out there for a day or two.

Posted by Nathan Dickson at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)