Tuesday 1st March 2016
The first of the three sessions that I have signed up to attend for my second workshop week is that of Jay Payne's Sound & Vision workshop; in which we looked and worked with visualising a tune from a given selection and shown how to visualise this in Cinema 4D and After Effects afterwards. This was one of the more interesting sessions for me because of the growing interest in animation that I am starting to swarm towards in a way because it holds some interesting opportunities to expand my working abilities. As Cinema 4D was a program I had never used prior to this session, getting this insight into how we could experiment with different factors of the program drew me in.
For the whole of this session we were given a crash course in C4D and it's workings, being shown around some of the basics (that referred to our session's brief that is) and how we could manipulate shapes to become an animated visual for a song. Using the provided footage of a room with a wooden floor, we set out tracking points of which we would later use to appropriate our 3D working space. Once we had posted out the correct angles and such of the room's floor, we set up the sphere that would later be distorted and experimented with in a series of different effects.
Upon setting out our sphere's within the 3D space we went on and utilized Node based programming - this was used to link together the range mappings of the sphere and morph it into the animation that we would later render. This animation was made up of different strengths of distortion and animation speeds depending on what the calculations were set at within the Node code itself. At this point the sphere would be flowing or rapidly distorting with sharp edges depending on the settings used by the designer. Moving from this phase the file was saved and then moved over into the After Effects program, using Cine-ware to create a link between the two programs with the final render.
Inside of AE the final touches were administered to the sphere's animation via the use of hue/saturation, changing the reflective properties and strengthening the shadow use on the piece itself. The first example of which is shown below as the first video displayed in this post:
As you can see the image created from the workshop is moving around the background ever so slightly by the means of the Y axis, it also shows a strong use of distortion in creating its morphs alongside the soundtrack.
