The final animation short footage I worked on was Best
Retailer. There was not much editing needed for the video footage itself, just
some colour correction and small enhancements:
Original
unedited footage:
As
you can see without any editing it looks pretty bland and boring. The vignette
focuses your attention on the middle of the screen where the main action takes
place.
However
our main problem on this category was that we had no idea how to present the
title of the award in a suitable way. We came up with the idea of presenting
the title on an old classic cash machine, but we couldn’t get our hands on one
and neither could the BBC. So I came up with the idea of finding an image of an
old cash machine online and edit the title onto it digitally. I then looked
into how I could do this; after a couple of hours of research I found a way to
animate an odometer effect within After Effects. This was a perfect way to
present the title on an old cash machine. We also had the idea of using this
odometer effect to animate the cost of the items in between shots.
I
took it upon myself to create the odometer. This was my Process:
I started off with this image I found on the internet.
I then
edited it within Photoshop so it was cropped to the appropriate size, colour
corrected and a suitable background image placed behind it:
Next
I imported the Photoshop file into After Effects and began to work on the
odometer to edit over the cash machine image.
To make the odometer I began by typing in the numbers 0-9
vertically on a new black composition:
Then
I created a new composition same in length but 4x the size in width. I copied
and pasted the numbers comp 3 times into the new composition and fit them in
together within equal distance. I also put white lines between each bar to
separate them:
I then applied the effect under distort called offset to each
number column. This means that when a number moves off of the screen area it reappears on the opposite side. I set the shift to center values to 75.0 , 750.0. Moving the Y value up and down causes the numbers to loop over and over
seamlessly.
However on an odometer each number section rotates at a
different speed, animating those by hand can be very tricky. This is where I
pushed myself much further than I had ever done before within After Effects. I
slowly started to learn how to use very advanced techniques such as expressions.
I researched how expressions worked by pouring hours of time into figuring out coding and understanding mathematical equations. I needed to create a situation
in which every number section of the odometer cycles at 10% or 1/10th
the speed of the layer to its right. For example every time the ones column goes
from 0 to 9 and back to 0 the tens column would go from 0 to 1 or 1 to 2 and
every time the tens column goes from 0 to 9 and back to 0 again the hundreds column should only change from one number to the next. To animate this I will be
controlling everything through a slider expression controller on a null object:
I then right clicked on the slider controller and selected edit
value. This dialog box allows you to change the slider range values. I set the
right side to 0 and the left side to 10000. I used 10000 because takes the
value all the way back to 0. On the odometer it will go from 0 to 9999 the next
number is 10000 but it becomes 0:
Next I opened up the effects on the ones layer and twirled
down offset to reveal the shift center to property. Alt clicking on the stop
watch next to it allows you to add an expression in the dialog box. The
expression I used was this:
“x=value[0];
offset=thisComp.layer("Null
1").effect("Slider Control")("Slider")%10;
y=linear(offset,0,10,1500,0);
[x,y]”
X=value[0]
means the term or variable called x is equal to the first value of this
property. The shift center to value has two values, a value for x and a value
for y. The first line of code in the expression says that the variables called
x are equal to whatever value is written in the shift center to X value box.
The
next line of code variable is called offset which is equal to whatever value we
have in the slider added to the null layer. I also added a JavaScript modulus
operator which is the ‘%10;’ at the end of the line. This takes the value of
the slider and divides it by ten and whatever is the remainder that’s the
number.This means x can never reach a value of 10, it can go from 0 to 9.999
etc but as soon as it hits 10 it jumps back to 0.
In
the next line of code the y value is being generated by a linear function.
Linear translates one range of values to another. As the value of offset varies
from a range of 0 to 10 convert that value to fit within the range of 1500 to
0. This means that when offset is equal to 0 y will be equal to 1500, when
offset is equal to 10 y will be equal to 0. When offset is 5 y will be 750. For
every whole number we gain in the offset variable the liner function is
subtracting 150. So offset going from 0 to 1 means that y goes from 1500 to
1350. That’s a difference of 150. Each number in it’s column has its own 150
pixel by 150 pixel space around it. I can use this change to offset the numbers
composition by 150 pixels or speaking visually to go from one number to the
next.
The
order of numbers in the liner function in this case is saying the value for
offset which always falls between 0 and 10 should be converted to a value
between 1500 and 0.
All
of these lines of code are just a definition of terms for whats in the next
line. The next line ‘[x,y]’ translates everything above into x y coordinates that
the offset effect can use.
Next I applied this expression
to the other number columns. However the code needed a slight alteration for
each one. For the tens column I changed the %10 value to %100 and in the liner
offset I changed the 10 to 100. I did this for the hundreds and thousands column just adding another 0 each time for both of the values.
Now when I animate the offset slider on the null object the
numbers rise and the numbers on the slider match the numbers in this area:
Now I wanted to somehow edit these numbers onto the cash
machine I created earlier and make it look 3D. To do this I began by moving the
numbers composition into a new composition which makes it the same size and length. I then changed the name of this new composition to rotated numbers and
rotated it 90 degrees. I then changed the composition size to 1500px by 640px:
I rotated this composition because later when I add a 3D
cylinder effect it wraps around on the y axis.
Next I moved the rotated numbers composition into a new composition.
I changed the name of this composition to odometer and set the dimensions to
640px by 480px. I then used the effect CC Cylinder. Using these settings as
show below I got this effect:
I made sure the rotation and size of the cylinder would match
the correct position to go on the cash machine:
I think the final result of this was excellent and I think I surpassed
what I was previously capable of doing in After Effects. Working out how to
create this took all my knowledge of the program combined.
I managed to blend the odometer convincingly into the cash
machine and had it animate very realistically like a real odometer would by
simply key framing the slider control at the appropriate moments:
My original goal with the odometer was to present the title,
so using the skills I had just learned with expressions and so on I applied the
same techniques in creating the title:
The final animation can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bglqNA24R7M
