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Investigation 5/10: My Brief Introduction To After Effects

Learning to use After Effects is something that I always planned on eventually doing. I still do intend on learning everything I would need to know about After Effects, but I have already experienced a brief introduction to using after effects.

Background

The reason that I started using After Effects was to create a meme. The meme that I wished to create my own interpretation of the video "Patrick on a seahorse listening to fly me to the moon". The original video is a modified version of the ending credit sequence of the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion in which the character Patrick Star of the children's television show Spongebob Squarepants rides atop of a seahorse while the song Fly Me To The Moon (originally sung by Frank Sinatra) plays in the background. After coming across this meme, I felt that I wanted to create my own version of it using a video that had previously been recorded. The problem that I encountered however, was that the video was not recorded on a simple backdrop/green screen. This made it practically impossible to layer my video over the original meme cleanly. Looking for a solution to this problem is what led to me using After Effects.

Using After Effects

Once I knew that I would need to use After Effects, I quickly looked up tutorials of how to isolate a subject from a video. After watching a few quick videos, I was ready to begin my first attempt at removing my subject from my video. The process of doing this began with me importing my file into After Effects and using the Roto Brush Tool to mask out my subject. Once I did this, I advanced the video frame by frame and corrected the mask at points where it had gotten messed up. I repeated this until the entire video was complete. Next, I added the composition to my render queue and made sure that I specified the video output to be RGB + Alpha so that I would be able to layer the video over top of the original meme without having a black background. Once the render was complete, I imported the clip into Premiere Pro and finished making my meme.

Thoughts On After Effects

Despite the fact that I had no idea how to properly use After Effects, I enjoyed using it and I understand how useful of a tool it is. Even though my first project using it wasn't very polished nor was it something creative, I can see practical applications of using After Effects in more important projects. I plan on returning to After Effects soon in order to learn how to properly and efficiently use it. But until then, I can sit back and watch the meme I created after using After Effects for the first time.
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