Week 8 - Animation and Exporting

After finishing my editing of the filmed aspects of the advert, I set to quickly animating a short Flash Sequence. I used new techniques which I had only touched on in previous tutorials, namely masking.

I was looking to create an effect whereby as the glass on the right hand side of the frame in the film was filled with liquid, in the empty space to the left, the Pulp logo would fill with colour from the bottom to top in a wavy motion, as if being filled by drink. To do this I had a vectorized version of my Pulp TV logo, which I imported into the library as a graphic. I then placed this on the film and used Brake Apart to split the individual elemtns apart, allowing me to delete the white background layer. Then by creating a new graphic and using a Paint Brush (with 100% smoothing to create a vectorized look) I made to rectangles of colour with a wavy top. These shapes were the height of my logo. I made the Pulp Tv logo a masking layer, which means that it does not appear in the animation and you can pass shapes under it to distort the images. I set the shapes in opposite bottom corners of the logo, before using the motion tween to move them to their opposite tiop coreners. This way the two shapes cross over each other and create a realistic flowing movement, more closely mimicking liquid.

Flash Shape Movement

To start the animation I had imported the shots that would be animated into the Flash project. This way I could sync up the Flash and Film and (in theory) reimport it back with ease (this was not the case, read further below for more details) I ran both the Flash sequence at 25 fps (my highest use yet) to create extra clarity and flow of movement, which is definetly necessary when animating something that moves as freely as water.

Lastly I used another masking layer, this time in the shape of a square. This covered the "drip" below the first P of the logo. In sync with the cream being sprayed onto the drink in the film, the mask moved down to create the dripping effect.

With the Flash complete i attempted to export as an avi and reimport to Premier. Unfortunatley this did not work at all. Despite me setting custom canvases for Flash to fit Premiere, the reimported file would either come back into Premier either too thin and squashed or with big black bars either side. No m,atter what I tired it wouldn not correct the aspect ratio to a widescreen format. This was when we discovered that the problem probably lied somewhere in the fact I was in a standard definiton project using high definition rushes. This caused them to compress and ultimately meant they couldn't understand that they could be widescreen. This was very frustrating. I had checked many an internet forum looking for a solution but could not find a certified answer.

I decided to work on it out of class and as college PCs were unavaible I had to attack it at home. This meant converting to CS4 ( i made mutliple backup copies in CS3 so i could work at college if needed, as there is no backwards compatibility). I planned to avoid exporting any rusyhes and instead would only animate the area that would be animated inside flash. That way my canvas would have no correlation to aspect ratio, instead to the shapes requirements. I set the bacground as a solid black. This was twofold as firstly black was pretty damn close too the ultra dark blue on the american flag in my rushes so would be difficult to notice and because if the balck bars appeared no one would be able to see them. This worked and I carried out exactly the same animation process described above.

This worked well, and simply had to be placed over the area, and then the gaps were filled in using black PSDs. With a little bit of splitting I managed to fit it perfectly to the video track. To save time on the final shot which was suposed to have a masked wipe, I instead used key frames and the crop effect in Premiere to create a logo that wipes in as if from nowhere.This was black as well although I would have prefered it a dark blue. My project was now finished but again, exporting was an infinite issue. I had it set to PAL Widescreen settings and codecs, and checked everything, including the ouput and source over and over. Unfortunately though, no matter what I did the file refused to be fully export as an AVI as intened. After mutliple tries and small tweaks including output files, nothing would work. My only option was to export as H.264. For some reason this worked meaning my file is now a .mov.