Motion Graphics Assignment Part I

Here comes the second week of After Effects… are we ready?  I think we are.  The tutorials have really helped me get used to the software.  Coming into this section of the course, I was a little discouraged and unenthusiastic.  Last year, we used tutorials online from Video CoPilot, but they were so dull and tedious because they were pretty long (20-40 minutes).  As a result, we didn’t have much time to explore with the effects before our class ended.  However, now that we’re shown the basics of AE, I find it much easier to experiment and come up with effects by myself during my lab time.

Fonts and Shapes tutorial.



Type Animators tutorial: animating a whole word letter-by-letter, instead of creating a layer for each letter.




This is the original trailer for the movie that I want to base my Motion Graphics assignment on.



Some of the keywords and images that are significant the movie are beach, music (piano), family, friendship, forgiveness, letters (from Ronnie`s dad) and love.  Using them as a starting point, my initial idea was to go to a beach and write the Last Song in the sand and record it being washed away.  In AE, I would reverse the footage, making it look like the waves pulled back to reveal the title.  However, the weather has been pretty horrible.  Therefore, I scrapped that idea and went back to the drawing board.

Ronnie moves in with her estranged dad in his beach house for the summer, where she meets Will, a boy she soon falls in love with.

Now, instead, I decided to show the images through photos.  In Photoshop, I would add a white boarder to them.  Then in AE, I would animate them to gather in a box, representing the protagonist (Ronnie) packing her father’s belongings in boxes at the end.  To reveal the title, I would have someone put the cover on the box.  Other possibilities that I`m thinking of are to somehow create the illusion of waves washing the photos away or winding blowing them away to reveal the title.

Ronnie`s little brother, Noah, is upset by news he receives as summer comes to a close.

The inspiration for the photos flying into the shot is from Lindsay Lohan`s music video for Confessions of a Broken Heart, which coincidentally is about her father as well.  At 3:00 in the music video (below), the photos fly from the ground and her bed to stick on the window.  I`m hoping to reproduce a similar effect for my trailer, using the 3D axis and stills that I have taken.

The Last Song Trailer and Ronnie and Will
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwLmQqRanvM
Noah
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_VdwVr-Ua4
Lindsay Lohan - Confessions of a Broken Heart
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leg-vg2YQDM&feature=related