Hello 12 MWF VE, A, and MG students,

     Today we covered the first two sections of "chapter" 1. The Floor from 

1. The Floor - 17m 38s

 ***   i.  Building the grid floor - 8m 48s        GRID FLOOR
 ***  ii.  Creating a radar sweep - 5m 13s         RADAR SWEEP
 *** iii.  Adding lightning - 3m 37s

After Effects Apprentice 15: Creating a Sports Opening Title 
                                      with Chris Meyer and Trish Meyer

      Login to lynda.uni.edu     ( http://lynda.uni.edu )

and search for the 3 word phrase - Sports Opening Title
     to find "chapter" 15 of the
     AE Apprentice book/lessons.

     We will add the lightning on Friday in class.  

     Curly Lighning.mov is the footage file we will use.
     ------------------

     Review the first two sections is you get a chance and watch the
adding the lightning section ahead of time, if you get a chance.
It is only 3 minutes 37 seconds long.

"In the last movie, you made this animated gradient. In this movie, we will add some
 more interest by compositing a lightning movie on top of this layer. In the Sources,
 twirl down Movies. You're going to be using the Curly Lightning.mov from Artbeats.
 What I am most interested in are the white lines and a little less of the blue
 smoke. So we'll need to color correct this so we're not adding too much blue."

"There are lots of ways to change the color, but I think Color Correction > Tritone
 is quick and easy. It changes the blue to a sepia color, and I can click on this
 brown and maybe make it a little more desaturated. In fact, if you want to choose
 the exact color we used in the book, it's 90 for red, 85 for green and 70 for blue."

     See the following example from summer of 2010 which uses the 
FLOOR ideas for a 3D After Effects floor with a GRID and transparency masks and the
lightning and animated gradient from this GRID FLOOR and RADAR SWEEP stuff we did in
class today and the LIGHTNING footage we will add to it on Friday.

     http://www.cs.uni.edu/~jacobson/AE/16/Boids.html

     The birds that flock across the forest at the end are created in After 
Effects too.  We will do that sometime later this month.

Video tutorial 1: Build a Boid: How to build and animate a bird in 3D is part one of
                    a two part tutorial by Aharon Rabinowitz.

Video tutorial 2: Creating a Flock of Birds is part two of the Creative Cow
                    Rabinowitz fun tutorial. Create the flock from the original bird 
                    and then composite it and animate the flock as your AE skills
                    take flight to new heights.

     Mark