Life Is About Balance from Daniel Boscarino on Vimeo.
In this session, I have learned something new which is how to manipulate the camera view of the video in a way that it zooms in and out and at different pace.
For me to get to that part, I had to create the scene of the video, just like the previous After Effect session, I will be using text in my video.
To start off with, I had to think of a quote or saying to use so I decided to use 'Life is about balance' because it is something I usually say so it relates to me. I used Illustrator for the text and I used the 'OCR A Std, Regular' font for this. I had to create separate layers for the font so each word had its own layer so that when I uploaded it on After Effects, I could edit one word at a time separately.
I didn't want just the text to be included in my video otherwise it would look boring so I decided to include a scale because it relates to the word 'balance' and it makes the video look more busy and just plain which I then added a background to it.
I experimented with the scale and the text because I was trying to find a look that I liked. I wanted the scale to move from being unbalanced to balanced so I had to create several layers of the scale and had to change the position of it each time to get that effect.
I decided to go with the see through scale look because I want the viewer's focus to be on the text but at the same time, the scale can be seen slightly which gives it a nice effect.
The next step was uploading everything into After Effects and placing everything in order so I would have each word shown one at a time then the scale appearing during it. I wanted to emphasize the quote and the word 'balance' so I decided to have the words 'about' and 'balance' appearing from the top then moving towards the unbalanced scale then landing on the scale to make it balanced, I achieved this by using the 'transform' - 'position' tool which I have used in the previous sessions to make the words move from top to bottom and I made the scale move by using the different layers that I created on Illustrator and placing them in time with the words.
Finally, it's the part that I have learned today, as shown in the video, the camera of the video seems to zoom in slowly, that was created by the camera settings, I used the 'point of interest' and 'position' tool' as shown in the image below to make it move and zoom in.
Conclusion
I think today's session was useful because I have learned something new which is always good to do. I think knowing how to use the camera settings is vital because the camera view of a video is important, e.g if you want something emphasized, zooming in is a good way to do that because it enlarges what you are trying to emphasize.
I will definitely use this in the future but for now, I feel like I still need some practice with it and After Effects overall, as you can see from the video, there's a lot of work to do to improve it and I feel like the camera might be a bit too slow zooming in.
