Metroid's run for your lives ...

This was a fun little effect. I cut out a picture of Samus and placed her atop that little planet in photoshop. Then I took that image and stuck it in After Effects.

I wanted to have Samus charging up her laser beam. I went ahead and slapped a Beam affect on her. I made the start point her gun and the end point just off screen so it was faux 3D. Then i just adjusted the length and timing to where I wanted it.

Then I needed my little charge up particles.

I wanted little power spheres, so I went ahead and made my particles faded spheres after trying both bubbles and shaded spheres. I matched the color to the lightest part of the beam. My rate was only .2 per frame and my longevity was about half a second. I didn't want there to be much coming out of the gun, just a slight effect of charging particles. For the motion I ended up using the twirly and adjusted the camera position, so that they looked like they were spreading out from the gun rather than falling out. Then I adjusted the emitter position to line it up with the barrel of her cannon.

Boom! I'm a firing my laser!

Untitled from William Maddox on Vimeo.

motion tracking

I used 2 trackers to follow the top corners of this letter. I basically went frame by frame seeing if the trackers were following, then I would let it play and see if it would stay on. To try and reduce the rotation, shake, and scaling problems I went into the graph editor and removed keyframes that seemed to cause problems. Then I just attached a text layer to the null and made a nice little letter...

Untitled from William Maddox on Vimeo.

Falling in some sort of alternative universe

Nothing like Chroma Key.

It was pretty simple. I grabbed the footage. Then I used this keylight tutorial found here .

From there his hand was a little cropped b/c it went out of the shot. So I trimmed the workspace to a square I cut out around him. From there I just threw a glow on.

falling down like yikes. from William Maddox on Vimeo.

superman titles

This was a relatively painless procedure once you found the right walk thru online.

For this project I started out with my main body text "dorm antenna cable"

I set the background color and the font color and adjusted the kerning. Once I knew what I wanted the text to look like at the end, I animated per character and changed the scale and opacity. I also threw a blur on there as well. Then I turned on the ease to make it a nice fluid bump that runs through the text as it appears.

The superman text numbers:

I found a little tutorial that showed me how to change some of the specific settings on the echo filter. This achieves the text stretch. I turned on motion blur to help this as well.

To find out how to do this effect:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKmMHFsIxQc



Then at the end I put a camera on a null to dolly into the moving text.

This will be used as a closing slide for some TSTV commercials next spring.

Digital Slate from William Maddox on Vimeo.

=Will

A Shining Halloween Treat

So you love the shining and you love After Effects 3D. Whatever will you do to combine the two:

First:

I grabbed a pic of the Grady Twins and masked out the ugly crappy hotel hall from the movie.

I grabbed another hotel hallway and created a vanishing point in Photoshop to make it 3D.

Pull both of those badboys into after effects. I started out with my lights. I made an ambient navy light that would flash on an off still leaving some deep blue shadows. Then I placed a spot light at the light fixture in the picture. Made it point down and out towards the camera. I put a camera in there and dollied it forward while playing with the orientation to make the hallway rotate a little bit. I also added a bit of wiggle to give it a slight handheld effect with a magnitude of 6. From there I just added the Grady twins in and leashed them to the camera. I set some opacity key frames to make them ghost like and there you have it.

A new shining scene.

Shining Hallway from William Maddox on Vimeo.

Me 2 Me 2 Me 2 Me 2 Me 2 Me 2 Me etc.

This looks great, and was very simple. I framed the shot the way I wanted and left the camera running. Shot myself and captured.

Then in after effects I just opened up the mask settings in my timeline. Split the footage with shift, command, D and lined them up in the timeline. Then I just used the pen tool to cut myself out (the sitting me) and there you have it.

Easy way to get as much "you" as you need.

Willy and Billy from William Maddox on Vimeo.

I love the puppet tool

So this guy in the America hot air balloon is totally going to die...  

This was a fun little project.  I got several hot air balloons, a few of which I did not use.  Used a mask to cut them out, and smoothed to refine the shape.  Then I got a picture of Austrian Alp background, and put a lens blur on it.  

I originally wanted to do a hot air balloon race, but didn't think that it would make use of some of the more advanced animation features.  

I think the temporal idea behind this is that balloons are constantly changing in speed depending on the wind.  

I did all of the movement with scale and position.  I pushed the anchor point out of the composition to make it huge in the ground and chug its way across the screen.  Once I had all of the key frames set, I got in the graph editor and started playing with the curves to make it decelerate as it got further away from the camera. 

Then came the puppet tool.  When I saw it for the first time, I knew it would work perfectly on a balloon. So i set 10 pins in the balloon and went to the end of my timeline and scrunched it up to blow up this guys balloon.  All that is missing is a crash, scream, explosion.  

Untitled from William Maddox on Vimeo.