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Humans to aliens
I;m a student at UA, and recently got recommended to help with the editing on a project for the dance dept. at school. In a nutshell, the dancers will, at some point during the show, go behind a couple monitors in the middle of the stage, which will act like x ray machines and show their “true form.” Their “human form” wont be seen.
anyway, there is a point where one of the dancers will transform from a human (which wont be seen on screen) into the alien form that you can see. The choreography has the other aliens grabbing parts of the human, and those parts are supposed to materialize into the alien form as the other dancers touch them. So, one dancer grabs his arm, and the arm starts to materialize, then another dancer hits his back, etc.
I have been searching the tutorials and the forum for about two weeks, and have found some good stuff, except that most of the ideas that are used are with plug-ins that I dont have access to.
As a college kid (read: broke) i have the trial version of After Effects, and for some reason the editing lab on campus doesn’t have any of the CC plug ins for AE. So the best idea I’ve come up with is using Particle Playground (since it’s the only particle effect I can find) and adding some masks to the areas I want to materialize. I added a blur to the actual image as it fades in and blur out the particles as they fade out. It looks decent enough, but I’m wondering if anyone has any better ideas or can point me somewhere that might help.Also, there should be a static/noise flickering when the alien forms enter the screens and randomly throughout the production, which I have already, but any good ideas for that would be appreciated too.
sorry for the long post, but thanks
-Pat
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2 Replies
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Hello Patrick,
I hate to be the one to burst your bubble (before Dave LaRonde does it next) but if you have as little experience as you clearly state that you have, have only the trial version of After Effects, do not have any of the plug-ins nor the resources to get any — well, let’s just be kind and say that this is such a complex problem that you are not going to get there from here. Oh, you could if you had endless time to tweak and figure out a long myriad of issues, one at a time, until you eventually figured out things like motion capture (a highly complex subject for most), matching animation choreography (another complex subject), and a bunch of others. Mess up on any one of them and your subjects are going to blame you that their production didn’t work.
This one is out of your league right now. Pick something simpler to start with, something attainable.
As I said, if you had endless time you could figure these issues out, but you don’t and there is a deadline.
I am sorry to have burst your bubble but if you want more issues than I have named, you could pop over to the COW’s Live Events & Staging forum where they will give you another whole set of issues that must be addressed before this will work.
My sincere apologies for throwing cold water on your aspirations.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronlindeboom
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine
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The CC effects don’t come with educational versions, if I recall.
Do you have the Turbulent Displace effect?
I’ve found that if you combine effects to make a kind of “not there” to “there” effect, it’s, well, effective. Examples would be:
– blurry to sharp
– transparent to opaque
– blown out (white) to normal
– turb. displaced to not turb. displacedCombine those to get a transition you like. Add some particles if you like.
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