As this is my second time ever using After Effects, I really wanted to explore the different things I could do. I knew I wanted to a neon glow effect with the text, but debated what to do with the background. I thought about empty streets during the night, desert scenes, and stars. When browsing street pictures, I didn't find one that quite fit what I wanted. I think it would have looked cool, but I also wanted to add effects to it for practice. That's when I searched star background tutorials in after effects and came across this tutorial:
I did everything but the loop control. I did have to go back and edit the fades though since it looked weird having it on infinite loop on vimeo.
Things I learned from this portion:
CC Ball Action
Adding Cameras (and changing what you see)
Moving Comps and manipulating them
How to make things appear on loop (though my final product did not do this - I went through the process)
Then I made the background invisible while I figured out the text.
I downloaded a font from Dafont.com (all credits are in the video description), and then followed this tutorial. The "presents" portion was just me messing around.
Things I learned from this portion:
Adding plug-ins
How to manipulate said layers with plug-ins (and what not to bother with)
How different transformations can effect text (opacity --> flicker effect)
Practice with ease-in/ease-out/easy ease
Offset character
Opacity and position keyframes
Parent layers (kind of)
From a design perspective, I know this is not the most aesthetically pleasing. I didn't really go into it with that as my primary focus however. It was really just me getting comfortable with this program and starting to scratch the surface of what I can do with it. That being said, there is potential for this. I think working through some more iterations, I could get to one that has all the aspects I like, but work better as a coherent whole. The idea: neon signs, stars, movie studio-esque vibe = a good representation of me.
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