Wednesday 29 July 2015

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Generating the Information

    Working on the first title card I realised that the process of creating text I was using was a rather arduous and time-consuming process. Rather than constructing in photoshop and composing in Adobe Flash like before, I looked into the text generation features in Adobe After Effects to see if I could more efficiently produce the effect of text being generated onscreen.
    First I needed a script, which I wrote up on Photoshop so I could also get an idea of what the text could look like when it's displayed on the side of the animation.



    Text appears using a wipe. Like with the title and exit cards, I aimed for a speed of two letters per frame in order to simulate the camera's computer generating the text. I did have to make a choice between two generation ideas: The first idea was line-by-line, where ext would appear in lines, which a lot of modern computers do. Older computers however (and the sort where green text was common) did letter-by-letter generation. Because of the Alien influences and the fact that computers at the time Alien was made generated statistics via the second method, I stuck with that.

    Working on the text bodies I had the idea of keeping the majority lowercase instead of all-capitals, save for perhaps a "critical error" message, which by that point everything in the scene would be malfuctioning.

    When it came to superimposing in After-Effects however, I discovered that the black background accompanies the text when it was exported.to be inserted into premiere pro, this felt solved when I used a screen filter for the text layer however in light backgrounds the text proved difficult to see.


2 comments:

  1. Hi Mark

    If you're looking to learn more about After Effects I'd recommend Video Co-Pilot tutorials. They are industry standard and free....

    http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/

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    1. This is an impressive-looking resource. Thanks Alan! Although I was able to find out how to create videos in After Effects with alpha channels though a quick look using a search engine. I'll rememebr this resource though, it looks very promising.

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