A Joke About Water and an Important Announcement

            This month I’m learning about post production with the use of After Effects! I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy it, but I have so far, and I wanted to share a couple of projects I’ve worked on this week. One of them is purely for amusement, and the other I think I might actually be a little proud of.

This is the first project, which I’ve simply been calling Sad Window Rain.

One of the options for a beginner project was to add rain to a video, and my genius decided that meant filming the dolls that live in my dollhouse looking sadly out the window. It’s Poetic And Sad because the dolls living in the dollhouse represent me and my best friend, who moved across the country this summer. It’s Also A Joke because the music I chose to put in the video is from that iconic Australian mermaid show H2O: Just Add Water, that plays whenever any of the characters has a break up and they look sadly out the window while it rains for a full three minutes.

It was fun to get to play around with the rain effects and the layers and masking for this one. The masking is not perfect, and I’m going to blame the rain effect for this because whenever I tried to make a mask around the doll in the window it would ONLY mask in a rectangle, and it couldn’t have been something I was doing because I tried it with other effects and they all stayed in the mask perfectly. I managed to fake it by having two layers of rain in the window and a mask on both of them to that there’s at least a rectangle cut out around the doll.

The other project for this week was to make a title reveal.

            This serves two purposes. 1) School project, and 2) potentially an actual title reveal I can use for marketing my book when it comes time to publish.

              Yeah, you read that right. The Book of the Hidden is the series name and Inherent Nature is the title of the first book. I have previously talked about this book, though only vaguely, and it was known then as The Eleventh. I made a book cover for it a while back. Anyhow, I decided to bite the proverbial bullet and focus my energy come graduation on writing and publishing, and maybe I won’t make two cents on it, but at least I will have tried. I have a lot of skills as a Graphic Designer that I think will help me, I just have to go for it. Writing is my one true love, after all.

              Back to talking about the project itself! I wanted this reveal to be dark, and mysterious, and maybe a little spooky, hence the fog/mist. The title itself I made in Photoshop because I want to have textured gold text and I knew how to do that quickly there as opposed to stumbling around in After Effects trying to generate the text I wanted. After I put it all together, complete with light sweep, I realized it reminded me of something.

            This wasn’t a conscious decision but it’s unsurprising. I have valid reasons for my choices though. The distressed gold text is supposed to reference the actual literal book of the Hidden, a.k.a. the Galdrabok, an ancient grimoire that the Alfar a.k.a. The Hidden keep fighting over, and it’s got some gold lettering and is generally beat up after all it’s been through. The typeface is called Breathe Fire, and I like it for its kind of classic fantasy feel, and specifically the shape of the E’s, O’s and D’s. To me it gives a sense of runic writing without actually being in runes or obviously fake rune-like lettering.

              There may be an updated version that will have plants growing in around the title at the end, but I’m not there yet in my After Effects skill level. I can comfortably play around with rain and fog presets. I don’t know nothing about growing no plants in a digital environment. I can’t even keep real plants alive. Maybe I’ll know how by the end of this class.

              Not the real plants…the ones in After Effects. You know what I mean.

             

"It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish." J. R. R. Tolkien