Making Giants - Compositing

Joey Korenman : We left off last time with what's already looking like a pretty nice piece. So let's take one more peek at where we stand. Giants are not what we think they are The same qualities that peer to give them. Strength Are often the sources of great weakness. The Powerful are not as powerful as they seem. Nor the weak as weak.
Joey Korenman : So now we need to do a little magic on near shot. Here. We need this moment, which is the first time we really see the flower close up and we're relating to it. You know, we're, we're close to it. Uh, camera distance equals emotional distance as my good friend, Ron Zeitler would say, and we need this shot to pop a little more. So I think having some sort of burst of particles or dust or something just to, just to make this more of a moment is going to make the shot more special and that's going to help the next shot. Feel a little bit more like a crazy transformation is about to take place. We also need to do something with this type. At the end, it needs to be laid out a little nicer. It needs to be animated so that it just feels good, has a cool effect to it and gives the piece some nice closure.
Joey Korenman : So let's dive into after facts and get going. So here's our shot and we want to add some interesting little particles coming off of the flower when it kind of opens up like this. So what we could do is go to the trouble of actually bringing in the camera information from cinema 4d, using CINAware or something like that. But because this is such a simple camera move, I'm just going to kind of eyeball this. So let's start by making a new solid layer and we'll call it a particles. And we're just going to kind of play around with a particular and try to get something, um, you know, that, that feels like a subtle, but kind of interesting moment and, and kind of gives the audience, gives the viewer a hint that, okay, something's about to happen. This flower is waking up. It realizes what's happening to it.
Joey Korenman : Um, so I'm just going to go ahead and, uh, move the emitter right into the middle of the flower. And I'm going to add a camera to the scene and I'm just going to vary sort of roughly, um, let me just call this camera. Uh, and I'm, I'm just going to kind of eyeball the movement here. So I'm going to put a, um, I'm going to put a key frame on Z right here. I don't need X and Y and then I'm going to go to the end and maybe to make this even easier. What I could do is, uh, just really quickly make like a, make a solid layer, make kind of like a circular mask like this. That's about the right size, you know, like the same size as the flower, I'm going to make it a 3d layer. And then I'm going to go to the end here and I'm going to push this camera in like this, so that this stays about the same size.
Joey Korenman : And then I can kill that. And what that's going to let me know is that now my after effects camera is moving forward, close to the same rate as the cinema 4d camera. And because these particles are going to be kind of floating and doing weird stuff anyway, I think it's going to be just fine. All right. So, um, the first thing I want to do is figure out, you know, what should this emitter be doing? And I don't want it to just be emitting constantly like this. What I want is when this thing opens up, I want it to emit and then stop like a little burst of particles. Okay. And right now the default emitter in particular is just a point. So it's, it's literally just this one dimensional point. And what I actually want is for it to feel as though the entire yellow face of the flower is admitting.
Joey Korenman : So I'm going to go to the emitter settings and change that to a sphere. Um, and so now you can see that, well, actually, you can't really see anything yet. Uh, I need to increase the size of the emitter. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna increase the X and the Y size so that it's more or less emitting from the entire area of that yellow part of the face. And this should probably be a little bit smaller, right. So it really is emitting just from inside that yellow part, just like that. And I'm going to animate the particles per second from zero here, and then as it starts to open up, right, I want it to go up to, I don't know, maybe two 50 and then after maybe two, three frames, go back down to zero. And so what that's going to do is it's going to make a bunch of particles emit and then no more, all right.