This is an introduction I made for two videos that were produced by students at the Universidad de los Andes. I did the cut outs with photoshop and I animated them with After Effects. It was my first time working with After Effects. I went through the whole of the Lynda.com training and then dove into this project.
What do I have to say about this work?
To my mind, After Effects has all the good parts of Flash without the horrid movie clip, inside a movie clip, inside a movie clip. Well, it has that, but the setup is far more visual. In terms of editing, I missed my blade tool terribly. I realize it’s not a video editor, but you are still changing lengths, and in After Effects, it’s necessary to constantly drag endings.
Were I to create something like this again, I would try to control the photographic selection better. The photos that I used, from students at Los Andes, and from the people below, worked out perfectly. However, the majority of my time was spent making cutouts and reconstructing the background. It would have been far more effective to put the camera on a tripod, and take multiple images of the same scene, thereby guaranteeing open spaces where people previously were.
A number of the photos I used were from flickr, available under creative commons. All of the links below, except for Selket, were from flickr. I did ask permission of the photographers, and part of the reason I am posting this is to insure that they are happy with the use of their photos. The splash image is a composite from Ken McCown and Selket Guzman, links below.
In all, this project took well over 40 hours. It’s 40 seconds long.
Photos were contributed by
Students of the Universidad de los Andes
Selket Guzman
Julia Manzerova
Rodrigo Alverez
Roberto Young
Ken McCown
