After Effects

ANIMATION FROM A .PSD

Introduction to the use of After Effects to create a 10 sec video from a .psd.

Open a new file, then from “Composition”, “create new comp”. Set as follow:

Import the Photoshop file. We have different ways to import a file:

• Footage: flats all layers
• Composition: maintains all the layers, but adapts their dimension to the Comp sizes
• Composition – Retain Layer Size: maintains all the layers and their sizes

Therefore, we use the last option.

Then, we drag and drop all the layers we need for the project.

Each layer can be transformed in the scene through a series of parameters (position, scale, rotation, opacity) that can vary in the duration of the animation. We can “lock” the changes of the properties clicking on the stopwatch: this will set a keyframe on the timeline. Scrolling the time slider we can see that our scene start to animate through this keyframe.

As sometimes the movement of the objects can appear “robotic”, we can soften it opening the graph editor. Clicking on the keyframes we can smooth the lines (as it graphically appears also in illustrator) into curves. This will make the scene look more organic.

Once set the keyframes, applied the effect and set the camera, we can export the animation as a Quicktime file (.mov) going to File->Export->Add to render queue and adjusting the setting.

 

CREATION OF A VIDEO FROM AN IMAGE

In the second exercise, we created the basic .psd file instead of working on an existing one.

First of all, we imported our image into photoshop and we multiplied the background layer n-time, one for each layer of the scene we needed to create.

Then we deleted parts from each layer in order to create the depth on a 2D scene.

Once created the file, we open again After Effect and create a new project with the same settings we used before.

We drag and drop the layers, we add a camera (setting it on 35mm – the same used for taking the original photo).

We set the view into 2 Views, in order to see camera and image at the same time.

On the camera settings, clicking on the Transform arrow, we move the layers in order to have a distance of 500px between each of them, except layer 01 that stays at 0. Then we set the Point of Interest of the camera at 3500px (exactly where layer 08 sits).

We can then change the position of the camera through our 10sec video and fixing it using Keyframe. Therefore, we change the position and the rotation in order to give more depth to the video.

After Effects gives us the possibility to apply effects to our layers. If we have to apply the same effect for a group of layer, the easiest way to do it is to create a pre-comp that works similar to a group in photoshop.

We can also animate objects in the scene using the puppet tool.