Digital Photography & Imaging - Week 9

17.11.2025 - 21.11.2025 (Week 9)
Cheyenne Liew Khye Yean / 0378330
Digital Photography & Imaging / Bachelor of Design (Hons) Creative Media
Project 4

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LECTURE

Introduction to Adobe After Effects
 
What is After Effects?

• After Effects is a 2.5D animation software used for animation, visual effect, and motion picture compositing.
• Used in the post-production phase, can be used to manipulate imagery by combining layers of videos and images into the same scene.
• Manipulates vectors and rasterised art to create and tell a story (motion graphics).

Pre-compositing in Adobe Photoshop

• Layers need to be arranged and renamed properly to make it easy to be organised and animated when imported into After Effects.

Pre-compositing in After Effects

• All layers need to be organised and synchronised to the external software platforms (e.g. Photoshop and Illustrator).
• After Effects does not embed its media, it links to it.

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PRACTICAL

In class, we were instructed to either use the provided collage in the Teams folder or our own collage from Project 1 to create a 20-second animated video. I decided to work with my own collage shown below.

Figure 1.1 Project 1 Collage, Week 9 (19/11/2025)

I copied it into a seperate Photoshop file in the required 1080 x 1920 pixels size and rasterised all my layers.

Figure 1.2 Pre-Compositing Process, Week 9 (19/11/2025)

After I was done, I imported my file into After Effects and started with the animating. Based on my collage, I wanted to have the "paper" come out of the typewriter and have the spiky elements in the back move around like fire.

Figure 1.3 "Paper" Animation Process, Week 9 (19/11/2025)

For the "paper", I mainly just used the position keyframe to animate it. I also added a masked version of the typewriter in front to ensure the paper came out from the right area.

Figure 1.4 Fire Animation Process, Week 9 (19/11/2025)

For the fire, I used the puppet pin tool to move it around. It was a little complicated trying to have even timing within each keyframe, but I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

Figure 1.5 Final Animated Video, Week 9 (20/11/2025)

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REFLECTION

I've used After Effects for a past assignment during my foundation before, but this time it wasn't as overwhelming, given that I didn't have to learn how to navigate the whole software interface on my own. I did struggle with some parts during the process, however, I've also learnt some new shortcuts from the tutorial. Overall, I'm glad I got to experiment more with After Effects.