News: After Effects workshop

Visual effects & the film industry:

Programmes such as After Effects are the culmination of a long cinematic history of using and developing special and visual effects. Visual effects have become more invisible to audiences, and more widely used because of this, however:

'Filmmakers from the very beginning have sought to push the medium with special effects'. 

(Hollywood’s History of Faking It | The Evolution of Modern Greenscreen Compositing, 2013).

For example, as early as 1927, Frank Williams used a traveling matte in his film Sunrise (1927). A traveling matte is creating by filming against a blue or green screen, giving a uniform coloured background which allows the film to be copied through a blue or green filter to create a "female" matte (only a background, with the foreground action missing), as well as copied through a red filter to leave only the foreground action, a "male" matte; combining these creates the travelling matte, in TV known as "chroma key" (Monaco, 2009:150-1).

Therefore, it can be seen that even effects such as using a green screen have long been used and developed by filmmakers.

Using today's software such as After Effects, it is easier to separate backgrounds and foregrounds after filming with a green screen. For example, the picture above was able to become:

Steps:

1. Add the keylight effect to the composition by going to: Effects > keying > keylight

2. Using the screen colour dropper feature under the keylight effect tab, select the colour of the green screen. This will make the background black, which is transparent.

3. Change the view under the keylight tab from "final result" to "screen matte". This will make the foreground white, and leave the background black, also exposing any grey areas (shown above).

4. Adjust the clip white and clip black sliders under the screen matte tab to get rid of the gray areas, leaving solid black and solid white. Change the view back to "final result".

5. Add the background to the composition.

The video above could be better by getting rid of the grey areas using the clip black and clip white sliders. However, it does look like the reporter could actually be in the setting.

Text:

When creating text in After Effects, the first thing to do is bring up the grid so that the text can be positioned correctly, and within the borders of the frame.

By duplicating the text (using cmd & D), a drop shadow can be created:

To give the text a background, a rectangle can be placed behind it. The effect bevel edges can also be added to the rectangle to make this look 3D. Within this effect you can change the edge thickness, light angle, colour, and intensity:

Effects:

Other effects are also available in the programme, such as autoscroll. This could be used in a news bulletin to create the banner of stories which runs across the bottom. For example:

The effect CC Sphere can take a 2D picture, such as this map:

And turn it into a 3D sphere, similar to the BBC news globe:

To make this globe turn, I also added keyframes (the blue diamonds in the picture below) under rotation on the Y-axis:

To make a standard text title more interesting, effects such as a gradient ramp can be added, which slants the text and colours it in a gradient. This effect uses a 3D layer and a camera layer (35mm). The text can then be made to move with keyframes (similar to the rotation ones above).

With this example, position keyframes were used to make the text pop up into the frame, scale keyframes make it decrease in size, along with opacity keyframes which allow the text to disappear from the screen entirely.

Overall, today's post-production software makes it easier, and much quicker to create more realistic visual and special effects than ever, because of the long development of techniques throughout film history. This has meant visual effects are increasingly being used, especially in TV, since the tools are available (Idelson, 2017).

Bibliography:

Hollywood’s History of Faking It | The Evolution of Modern Greenscreen Compositing (2013) [user-generated content online] Creat. Hess, J. July 18 2013 At: https://filmmakeriq.com/2013/07/hollywoods-history-of-faking-it-the-evolution-of-modern-greenscreen-compositing/ (Accessed on 10 October 2018).

Idelson, K. (2017) 'Visual Effects Are on the Rise in TV' In: Variety [online] At: https://variety.com/2017/artisans/awards/visual-effects-are-on-the-rise-in-tv-1202449434/  (Accessed on 10 October 2018).

Monaco, J. (2009) How to read a film. (5th ed.)  Oxford: Oxford University Press.