Whelp. This assignment was far more challenging than I was expecting, but all in all, I’m pleased with the way that these all came out. Here are my original cinamagrapghs:
After Effects:
Overall, I’m happy with the way this turned out. There are cascades that run near to my house, and I narrowed in on a small area that I really liked. Following the After Effects tutorial, I managed to get a clean loop of my video. My only slight annoyance is that the reverse-time layer looks really noticeable to me. I tried to manipulate my file so that it looked like the water only flows in the one direction that it is meant to, but I couldn’t get it to do so without a hard skip at the end. I desaturated the pre-comp and added some brown tones to it.
Photoshop:
I had a lot of trouble with this file – not necessarily getting it to work in Photoshop, but getting it to loop in my browser. This was one of FOUR different stove scenes that I recorded, but no matter what I tried, it just wouldn’t loop. Thankfully, Christopher (from this class) pointed out a way to manipulate the frame rate in Photoshop and I was able to get it to work.
I did some slight editing – converted it B&W and then erased the portion of B&W layer to expose the red elements in the frame. I wish I didn’t have to adjust the quality as much as I had to in order to export it because I feel like the kettle is too pixelated. The full-sized image looks pretty great.
After Effects:
I went back to After Effects for my final one because I don’t have a lot of experience with this program, and figured it would be good practice. So, if it isn’t immediately noticeable, the only motion in this cinematograph takes place in the windows of the theatre. I recorded this scene specifically for the movement of the flag in the wind, but again, I had trouble getting it to loop because it is so large. I’m going to post it here anyway cause I think it looks pretty cool (just give it some time to re-load the loop):
I’m glad I was able to make this clip work out anyway, because I was shooting from a parking garage, and didn’t really want to pay in order to shoot it again. I wish you could see more lights from the passing cars in the windows, but it was a pretty slow traffic night on this particular evening. I do really enjoy that I can’t detect where the loop starts and ends when watching it like I can with my first one.
I shot a total of 12 different scenes/clips just to come up with these three using a tripod and my Nikon D810. This was a challenging assignment, but I can see myself doing more of these in the future now that I have a handle on the process.