Evaluation VFX

The brief for this module was to create an ident or opening sequence for various television channels/programs. I chose to do the ident for Alibi channel, which consists of murder mystery programmes predominantly. I chose to do this one due to my influence from frank millers graphic novels, which are set in a film noir style. This being said I thought I could utilise the influences I had from his films and novels to create a film noir based, graphical ident.

I wanted to create a really heavy after effects piece and so want really interested about getting some footage for the brief but rather making everything from scratch. With my previous experience in Photoshop and illustrator I found I was easily able to work with all 3 programs to create the ident. The graphic novel/film noir style I was looking for was really easy to reproduce in Illustrator. There were no real issues with the whole scene design process as I had already planned out a storyboard and was fully capable of using illustrator for this purpose. Only one thing was testing and that was the fact that I produced the first scene as an a4 poster and not the HD widescreen size.

During the process of the brief and working heavily in after effects I have found myself to be quite accustom to the software, much more so than flash. Maybe it is because of the user interface is a lot easier and understandable. From here on I had no real issues with making the actual scenes. However when it came to rendering I faced countless issues including freezing of video, scenes skipping and audio not working. It was disappointing to see that my hard work had messed up right at the end especially for the final crit. These were all solved inevitably but I did have to remake some sound layers using final cut pro as on after effects they were out of sync. I can’t understand as I had them perfectly aligned on my composition and until it rendered worked perfectly.

Given the chance I would have liked to have some animated text but with my problems towards the last week or so had to pass on this as there just wasn’t enough time to get everything done considering the amount of effect I wanted in the piece. Perhaps I was slightly over ambitions with the effects I wanted to achieve. However I really want to continue using after effects and hopefully produce some abstract work to match some of my produced music. This is defiantly what I want to continue to progress with this year.

Overall, I really enjoyed this module and am looking forward to future projects.