Documentary Opening Title
6/5/22
This was an idea for my opening title in my documentary. I wanted to challenge myself by learning some different text animation instead of just using the opacity and position tools in After Effects.
This was the first version I made which was just a mask reveal. I wanted to improve my knowledge on text animation and so I
looked at different animation types on youtube and I thought this mask
text reveal animation was quite an interesting animation for my
documentary. I started off by finding a font that portrayed a Golden Age of Hollywood look and I was thinking of using the stroke effect which we learnt on the 1st April but the font didn't work with the effect. Then I used gradient ramp for the background and changed the position of the start and end of the ramp to create the circle effect in the middle. After that I typed up part of the title for my opening title and drew a line for the transition and then drew a rectangle over the text, just reaching the line. The rectangle will be linked to the line and when the line moves so does the rectangle which causes the text to disappear and I did the same with the othe words I wanted to include.
With this opening title I started with the background which was made by creating a black background and another background but white. To get the white specks I used fractal noise and I changed the contrast to 522.0 and the brightness to -247.0. After I did the changes I made some black specks using the same technique with the white specks and took out the black background. The text is next and so I started with the colour using the fill effect, furthermore I added the glow and gaussian blur effect to the text as well. To get the text to disappear I used keyframe animation on opacity and copied and pasted the keyframe which i then used time-reversed keyframe so the gradiant of the two colours do the same at the end. For the jittering look on the text I used jitters and drift effect which i then coded and the code was (wiggle 24,0.5) so the 0.5 means how many pixels its going to move and the 24 is how many seconds it going to do it. With drift effect I also used code with that and the code was (0.5,5) and I linked jitters with drift and jitters with my text. I do like this vintage look and even though the TV look was from the 70s I thought it would be an interesting opening title for my documentary.
Documentary Music
10/5/22
With the music I didn't really know where to start so some of my ideas for the music were classical sound maybe quite mysterious as well or one that has a beat drop. I feel this music isn't what I would normally do but I was looking at different loops and putting them together seeing if any of them worked and if their was any inspiration with the loops and I have also used some royalty free music off Bensounds.
Documentary
27/5/22
This documentary had its good and bad points to it. It wasn't the best at the begnning as I had two ideas which were hard for me to decide on as they both heavily depended on people's availability. I decided to go with the Golden Age of Hollywood vs 21st Century films as I haven't seen it before, I have seen critics review one or the other but never went to depth of the similarities and differences of each era of film. I tried to find some critics or lecturers to talk in my documentary but no one came back for me to include them in so I went for plan b and my mum who has watched a lot of Golden Age of Hollywood films and my dad who has watched a mixture of sci-fi and thrillers from the Golden Age of Hollywood. I also included a friend who hasn't watched Golden Age of Hollywood films to give comparisons between my interviewees.
After I gathered the footage from interviewing I decided to start with my opening title and music as I wanted to try and challenge myself in learning more animation techniques. I used the same animation on my opening title for the questions as well which I added some of the music I made on garageband on in the background. After this I started to edit my documentary and I found it hard at first because there was a lot of footage that needed to be edited but I had instead of putting all the fototage of interview in which was going to do I did one interviewee edited that video and then repeated that again with the other two interviewees.
I finally did a last check with my documentary just to see if I had forgotten anything or there were some slip ups in the editing process that needed a fix. I then added a few more film examples in when the interviewees mention them just to had more bulk to the documetnary so its not just the people talking which would get boring after a while.
Second Submission
7/6/22
This is my 2nd submission which is a modified version of my first documentary which I used the feedback I gained. I do feel my documentary looks and sounds better because watching back the first submission I did feel the music was quite repetitive and it did get a bit annoying after a while. Even though I quite liked the 70s look opening title I did think it had no correlation with my topic but I kept the effect for the questions but used the other opening title.
When editing the submission the part that went well was music as I knew what sound I would like which was a calming but quite energetic sound. It would be pianissimo behind the interviewees but when the questions came up there would be a sense of a bounce coming fromt he music. There are many dynamics in the music it starts off quite pianissimo with just the piano playing and then as the string instruments come in the music becomes mezzo forte and then the drums are added which picks up the pace again and this dynamic and tempo change repeats through out the piece. I felt this piece would be a good fit for the documentary because it has these changes which brings a differently feel to the documentary.
The part that could have gone better would be cutting out the old music as some of the music overlapped the interviewee when they were talking, so I had to cut some of the interviewees interview for the music to be added.
Glossary
- Pianissimo-very softly
- Mezzo forte- moderately loud