Adding Effects

Here you can see effects added to the video of the game play, to help make the relation the video game more obvious. Cartoon effects were added to the sequence, as well as character HUDs with animated text. To do this just like in Photoshop the blending options were very useful, you just have to find the best one that will blend your image with the scene. By key framing the source text you can animate the text, by doing this at the exact time a player was hit, it looks like they are in the video game. This was a brand new technique I had not used for and was very simple yet effective. I discovered these techniques just by playing around with the functions in After Effects, it's amazing what things you discover.

Windows movie maker was used to produce the final sequence, for two main reasons, because it is much more efficient for doing simple things such as text animations and transitions and it produces a final video with a much smaller file size so it is more easy to manage, unlike After Effects.

Here you can see I added in the Smash Ball item by editing in and animating an image I found on the internet. Similar to when Mario grabs a Smash Ball in the video game video footage that was used in the final sequence.

I used after effects to add effects to the animation I created in Blender and also to some of the video footage I captured of people play testing the game to improve my final video sequence and also to develop my skills with after effects. I hadn't done much with particle effects in after effects before although I have used them in other programs such as Unity and Blender. For the animation I could have used Blender to create particle effects but I wanted a different sort of effect that I knew would be better to create using After Effects and would also not take as long to render and would be more easily manipulated in the scene, so a more efficient way of doing things. To help get me started I followed some of the Soul Removal tutorial from Video Copilot and then I tested a lot of different settings and functions before finding the look I wanted. I wanted the particle effect to look like a burst of magic, for the colours to match the character and the effect to look like it is being produced by the character, I believe this was achieved quite well. It was done by increasing the size and birth rate of the particles, and making sure they lived long enough to leave the screen. They also start white and end up green, giving a very nice effect.

The notes of how to create these effects and also how to create the character cards can be found in the log book I submitted with this project. The intention is that the log book and the blog compliment each other in representing my development process.