[Eric Barker]

One thing you also might want to add, is while you’re doing the “zoom”, create a very blurry partical generator that “blooms” out from the center to the edges of the screen (use thick lines, and gausion blurr them to hell). Then create an feathered oval mask in the center of the screen so that only the particals fade into view towards the edges of the screen. Do this all in a separate composition, and then speed up and slow down the composition as the zoom speeds up and slows down.

This should add to the “flying through space/time” look that you’re trying to achieve… and I don’t mean a “star trek warp” kind of effect, but a subtle, “we’re messing with the audience’s sense of time” type look.

[Eric Barker]

NOTE: This thread should probably be moved to After Effects Basics

Well, first off, this is going to be made a lot simpler if you know your way around Photoshop. Your best bet is to pre-make all your menus as photoshop files. If you know what you’re doing, it shouldn’t take long at all. Make as much as you can (everything that won’t be animated) in Photoshop, and then do the rest in After Effects. All you’ll need is to make a few rounded rectangle objects, go into style options, give them a gradient overlay (blue to black), a medium-grey stroke. Then go to “bevel/emboss” and chose “stroke emboss”. You’re going to have to merge the rounded rectangles down to one layer without the additional blending options, because After Effects can’t handle the stroke effect properly.

Play with the fonts, but it looks like something in the vacinity of Verdana will do (and remember to disable anti-aliasing… the PS1 didn’t have anti-alaising for text). Leave out the Progress bars, and the HP/MP text. You’re going to need a hand picture (you’re going to need to cut it out of a screenshot online somewhere). You may want to create the progress bars, on different layers from the background to the progress bar, and then use sliding masks in After Effects to make them go up or down.

The bottom line is, there are A LOT of very little things that have to be done to do this correctly. Nothing complicated, but a lot of little things. The more you can do in Photoshop, the less you’ll have to do in After Effects. Just remember you can implort multi-layer photoshop files into AE as compositions, and they’ll retain all their individual layers… but be carefull, any blending effects could be different or non-existant, so you may want to merge down your layers to simple raster layers without blending effects, before you import them.

See if this gets you started.