Scroll Animation and 3D Dogfish Bowl

The goal of this assignment was to gain experience with the Camera Tracker and 3D effects in After Effects. I put together a small clip using my previous sketchbook goldfish animation.

The first step was taking the video, of course. The first time I tried to film a clip, it ended up being too complicated and consistently produced an error when the software attempted to track the camera. Instead I chose a very simple pan of a dog bowl.

Step 1: Import video file.

Step 2: Right click on video now in a Composition, and hit pre-compose. There may be an intermediate step if your video is a little more complicated. Mine was simple so I didn’t need to mask out a smaller portion.

Step 3: Right click the new composition and hit ‘track camera’.

Step 4: Once all of the colored dots appear, select three (by holding shift) and then right click. First choose, ‘set ground point and origin’. Next, with the three dots still selected, right click again and select ‘create null object and camera’.

Step 5: Import any other materials. I imported the composition I made for the ‘fish jump’ in a previous animation. I also made a text layer with the words “dogfish bowl’. Both of these compositions were parented to the ‘Track Null’ object that we created in the last step.

Step 6: I positioned the fish sequences above the dog bowl, and went to work editing the text. I made sure I made ‘dogfish bowl’ a 3D object by selecting the small cube. I then used the x, y, and z orientations to position the text as though it was above the table.

I wanted to explore reflective properties of the fish animations as well as the casting shadows for the text, but ran out of time. I will have to come back to this.

The second assignment involved working with Expressions in After Effects, and in this particular case through a scroll animation. I found this particularly challenging, as I couldn’t get my fish animation to work with the scroll very well. I chose instead to to a simple circle growing larger as the scroll went down.

Step 1: I created an illustrator file with a width to match the composition and a length the same as the default for this motion library. I then created a background and circles increasing in size with a drop shadow. At first, the progression took up the entire panel, but I wanted to start with a single circle and end with a single circle, so most of the transition is in the middle.

Step 2: I imported the illustrator file (file>import>file) and dragged it into the composition. I then went to the default illustrator file and looked under transform>position to locate the expression, which I then copied.

Step 3: I clicked on my illustrator file, and went to transform>position. With that selected, I went to Animation>add expression. I then pasted the copied expression from the original illustrator file.

Step 4: I made sure I changed the file name in two places in the expression to match my illustrator file.

Step 5: I deleted the original illustrator file.

Step 6: Finally, I adjusted the curve values under the control layer to be faster in the middle.