Development:motion graphics, the beginnings

Turned out this project would require much more work than expected.

Before started shooting I have been learning to extend my After Effects workflow. I analysed the Glencore movie as well as other examples of motion graphics by P. Clair and figured out some of the transition effects he uses (simple Venetian blinds, and here I was looking for a way to draw a 'mask texture' to reveal it!).


Finally I went on to shoot my 'hand-picked, humane' wall.
The idea is to have a wall-long pan across the building and have the information reveal on the raw footage as the panning progresses.


I had a couple of attempts to get the sequence timing right. Oddly as it seems, one can pass the same distance in anywhere between 20 and 60 seconds!
My idea was to make this relatively short but something visually attractive, to involve the viewer for a bit longer. I was aiming for something close to 50-60 seconds. This obviously meant more work and filling in more content on the empty wall, yet it was an opportunity for me to showcase something more than just a title with a tag-line.

For this I needed to track the motion all over the footage which was pretty dificult for me at first (due to all the reference/tracking points constantly disappearing off the canvas), but 'with a little help from my friends' I finally figured that all it takes is to hold the Alt key. Simples.

this was a simple test with basic animation to see if it works.

The beginnings are never easy.
Turned out that despite of my animation going quite well until a certain point, I lost the pace and sped up my camera movement which rendered the text almost unreadable (not to mention if it was accompanied by revealing images which further distract/delay you from reading the text). Another issue was the ground level: as the camera shakes, the horizon(?) rotates all over : if I were to track the rotation as well, the text would be even more unreadable as it would jump all over the canvas 

we all make mistakes. This one though required me to reshoot the sequence.

I had to repeat the shooting.

The good thing was that working on the same After effects project, I (thought that I) did not have much to do except track the motion of the new sequence, then tamper a bit with the timing of reveal and relocate the images.
It wouldn't be fun if it was easy.
To be continued!