Timeline and Effect

Process
Taking the assets provided for this class, I first applied the tracker effect to the video, automatically creating tracking points for me. I then selected a point that I wanted to track, making sure that it is of high contrast.  Next, I created text and null layers, clicking the spiral tool and dragging it from the text layer onto the null layer, successfully  creating a parent pick whip.

Timeline and Effect

Process and Reflection
Taking the video of my lamp/wall light, I applied the tracker effect onto the video, then clicked on a point that I wanted to track. I basically repeated the steps from the activity but instead of using a text layer, I used a shape layer of a tiny white star.

Being online week, it was a little hard to follow the instructions (foreshadowing) because I had to tab in and out from Teams to After Effects, vice versa. It took me a while to understand the whole whipping thing.

Timeline and Effect

Process
The process for this is similar to one point tracking, just that there are multiple points to set up. Also, in this animation, a shape layer was set up over the phone, useful for video mockups. I created the shape layer on another composition, then added it onto the main comp for tracking purposes. For this activity, precision was key, as there are multiple points in the video where the tracker isn’t as accurate, leading to some inconsistencies for the tracking points. These inconsistencies were to be manually edited by oneself, which is very very tedious work, and I did not have time to go through with this because the next exercise was starting soon.

Timeline and Effect

Process
Just like the previous exercises, apply a tracker to the video then let the program analyze it automatically. I then chose a point where I wanted to track, then I added an image of something that I wanted to be placed at the point - I used a random silly image of a cat.

Timeline and Effects

Process and Reflection
I ran into a few problems when completing this activity. The first few videos I took did not want to work at all, the track points did not appear at where I wanted them to be. Finally, this video of my room’s walls worked and I decided to use a green screen video of a random cat as the object that will be placed onto the tracked points. I had to use a few track points for this in order for the tracking to be accurate and stable.  

Honestly, this whole session was just so hard to follow and idk if I ‘m just slow or what but it took me a while to figure out what was shown on the screen like... 10 seconds ago :-/ Regardless, I see this being useful for future purposes and at the time I’m writing this, my group is planning to employ these techniques in our final video for our studio project.

Process
First, I had to find an audio I wanted to use. Apparently, choosing an audio with more obvious waveforms would be better, so I took a snippet from Smash Mouth - Walkin' on the Sun, specificially, the beginning part. After importing the audio into After Effects, I had to convert it into keyframes under Keyframe Assistant.  
Next, using the pick whip tool, my shapes and my audio keyframes got connected and animated to move as the audio keyframes changed. In my case, I made the circle and man scale in size accordingly.
Finally, I added a background image and made the circle and man spin.

After Effects timeline for this activity

Reflection
Truth be told, I was completely lost this entire class. When the teacher was going through the repeater function, I was looking for tutorials online for the previous steps, as I completely missed them. Evident in my final animation, there is no repeater used because I could not figure it out. My main takeaway this lesson is that real-time online tutorials are not for me. Regardless, this was also eye opening as I can forsee many ways that audio reactive visuals can be used in video creation. It is unfortunate that I could not grasp it, but I will continue learning as I go :’)

Timeline



Process and Reflection
The emotions I got assigned were hatred and pleasure, contrasting emotions.

Firstly, I found a footage that I wanted to use, an old video of this neighbourhood cat that used to frequent my house. I then went on freesound.org to look for the audios I wanted to use. I started by editing the hatred one, using a bunch of screaming, growling, grunting, and evil sounding noises. This took me way longer than I planned, so for the pleasure one, I reused a bunch of sound effects such as the squishing and rustling noises. Finally, I stitched the compositions together, even including the original video, but I forgot to turn the sound on for that one (oops).

Once again, my videos thus far have all been rather shitty and this one is exactly the same. I did have fun this session though, replacing typical sounds with rather cartoonish ones, and even changing the tone of a video just by using sounds. I wish I could have synced up the video with the audios a little more but just like before, I ran out of time. Oh well, I still had fun.