During today's Process and Production session, I had Sara, developing my skills in After Effects, a programme I was introduced recently. A recent animation I put together using this software, included changing coloured slides to beats in the audio I downloaded. However this session involved me creating a short, 10 second book trailer of my choice. I already had pre-made slides to take to this session, as I had decided on a book I wanted to use earlier in the week.
The name of the book I wanted to turn into a short trailer clip was Girl on the Train. I recently saw this at the cinema and knew its tones and emotions well and clear - helping me put the trailer together. To begin with I set up an inDesign document using the correct dimensions, and took a picture that I had recently photographed to use as a background image throughout my animation. I adjusted the image so that it was a dark, gloomy grey scale setting, and also image traced the photograph to a high fidelity setting - this made the photograph more geometric rather than realistic. Once the image was adjusted, I used different sections of it for every slide, and on the 10th slide, it presented the whole image. I have screenshot a few examples of my slide background and placed them on the left.
I created a slide for each second, with quotes, phrases, authors name etc on each one. I used a light colour for the text to contrast against the darker imagery, and the font was a light weight typeface, used in both lower case and upper case, as seen in my Vimeo link below.
I came across a slight problem after adding all ten slides into my animation to play them back. I noticed that having a slide a second was much too fast for the audience to keep up with - some slides had two lines of text included. It was visibly difficult to read when the slides were changing so quickly, so I adjusted the amount of slides I used. I also deleted text and shortened my phrases for a more sharp, snappier effect. I now have seven slides over a 10 second time period, and I have added one fading motion in to a slide half way through.
I think my background image works well, and the text is suitable for the imagery - subtle so it does not over power in front of the edited photograph. I think if I had more time to decide and look into, I would change the audio I have picked, there were no beats to the piece, so it was difficult for me to decide when the slides were changing and how long I should give them all. However I am happy with my first proper motion graphics animated video.
