Lets Try: After Effects
Oh god help me I can’t handle this.
I thought I’d be clever and do color selection for my project brief. Do not do color selection for your project brief.
Pictured; What not to do.
I thought it’d look cool, and it sorta does, but in an eehhhh sort of way.
So how did I achieve this effect?
Well, first you need good lighting, and a color that isn’t too present in the background environment. I chose iPhone flashlight on a brown wall.
Next, keep your actors relatively still, dance moves or moves where the actors arms are covering their faces/colored areas are a definite nono.
Like this but everything that this is not, without everything that it is
Next, large blocks make the effect really stand out, so try not to get too intricate with any designs you might have
*sobs internally*
Don’t get me wrong; After Effects is an awesome program. There’re so many things you can do that add so much to the premiere ‘experience’. A problem with most stabilisation programs is that they select the points to stabilise from. After effects lets you stabilise based on an area; as long as you film larger than you’re intending to use, you could use a tape cross to denote where ‘stable’ is. This. Is. Awesome.
The color effects are cool, but nothing that premiere can’t do. Being able to throw sequences from application to application made the entire thing quite fun, and I think I’ve got a basic feeling for it.
The Power of Not being Unkind
A big part of recent lectures has been the idea of being fair to those you work with; don’t be an asshole and good things come to you.
Well, not to such extremes, but the point is made. It started me thinking about how I conduct interviews, and what I’ve started calling ‘not catching the trust fall’. When someones answers a question in an interview, they almost expect you to fill the ensuing space with another question. Their mind empties for the next question, and when you leave them hanging they grasp for whatever most relevant is left. The answer you get after this pause is usually the purest answer you’ll get, and due to it’s shortness it just so happens to be the most quotable. I got this idea from a seminar in high school, but only recently did I begin to think of it as outright manipulation; by not catching their trust fall, I might get a split second of awesome, but I still let them fall. I don’t know if I can ever really be comfortable with this notion, but I guess I’ll have to find out.
