In the session we were asked to create two separate scenes from a fairy-tale, and asked to include some kind of information or statistic from the story in the work. I chose Goldilocks and the three bears, because the number 3 is a recurring number and would be easy to include some kind of information on the screen.
I chose to create a wider, map style scene to act as a background for a title screen, and the scene where Goldilocks is trying the three different bowls of porridge.
The scenes were made in two different Illustrator files, just using flat vector shapes, with each element such as the trees, the bowls, the house, Goldilocks etc on a different layer. We also created a third file for the transition/wipe which needed to fill the full 1920 x 1080 frame at least once to cover the cut between the two different scenes. I did a massive bear paw print that comes in from the bottom, scales up to fill the screen and then moves off the top of the screen at the original scale.
We then imported each file into After Effects. If the artwork wasn't finalised it was best to import the file as a composition, but in order to work faster it was better to use the composition retail file size option. For each of the compositions we altered the duration to just 5 seconds (the two scenes together would add up to the usual 10 seconds). The wipe composition was set to a 1 second duration, because it only had to be brief enough to act as a transition rather than a whole scene on its own.
When using text, its often better to use the text tool within After Effects as you cannot add text effects to imported text files/layers. So once we had added the text in AE we added effects to the text for it to animate in, this is done by selecting the text layer in the timeline, going to the top bar and going to animation > apple animation preset and then finding the presets in the Adobe After Effects folder, seen as we wanted the text to animate in we selected the "animate in" sub-folder. After trying a few different ones I decided to use the slow fade in preset as this gave the best effect for my work, as it wasn't too ostentatious.
The next thing we tried was a tilt shift. This was done by importing a subtle paper texture into AE and into a new composition, dragging the desired scene into said composition and turning on the 3D switch. Using the 3D properties we twisted the paper texture using the x and y axises, and moving them back to a flat plane at the end of the clip, this would add some subtle depth and dynamism to the background. To get a depth of field type effect, which softens up the background and foreground you can add a new adjustment layer on top, adding a Gaussian blur, and using a marquee tool to mask out the subject and keep the desired area in sharp focus.
I tried this and felt that it didn't really add anything to my piece.
Given more time I would have liked to add some more scenes and neatened up the starting and ending as at the moment I think they are a little abrupt and something smoother would look better.
