Day 3

Work Experience 14/02/08

Today I am working on some After Effects stuff.

BDA is undergoing a global re-brand at the moment, and the whooshey wave animation on their website is being changed from a 3d thing to a flat vector (as this flat graphic style is now being applied to everything from business cards to dvds etc). The Sydney office had done an amount of the re-brand work, and had done some of the animation (masking a solid layer to make the wave shape). My job was to rework it for different sections of the DVD they are producing in a couple of different sizes.

I then spent the rest of the day doing the main wave animation, as half of it seemed to be missing. This basically involves going through frame-by-frame and tracing the wave with the pen tool, and altering the paths to look like the rest that came from the Sydney office.

I also found out some great info off some of the other guys, as I went for lunch with the design director and another senior designer:

They all say that they have pretty much given up using After Effects for 3D (For motion graphics). This is because it's actually better in the long term to learn Maxon Cinema 4D. After Effects 3D (2.5d) is a bit more fiddly to use, and when you finally get there, all you actually get are 'postcards in space'.

You can cheat After Effects so that it looks almost the same, but that involves building sides on objects to make it look more real. I have been struggling with this on my project, and now I know why!

I plan to start learning Cinema 4D at some stage this year, as this will help with After Effects. The two programs work really well with ether. 3D objects can be exported to After Effects along with the cameras and lights, and I have been reliably informed it's not so bad doing 3d for Motion graphics (unlike doing 3d animation proper).