Final BLU style animation

I have completed my BLU style animation using Adobe After Effects. I attempted to try and re-create some of the elements from the BLU graffiti video. Below is the animation combined with a simple audio track:



I started off by taking my distorted ghost animation (see previous post) and implementing it over a photograph. I went out with a digital camera and took many photos of a particular spot in the college; my original plan was to have the ghost flying around the side of a wall and off into the distance. The animation was disorientating as the ghost moved past various photos (like a scrolling game) that looked alike . I tried to fix the animation by stiching the photos together like a panorama which had poor results - I stuck to using only one photograph.

Example of a panorama photograph

Photograph I used for the final animation

Using the same principles as animating parts of the character in Adobe After Effects (see this post), I animated the position of the ghost animation to move about the screen. I grouped the animation into its own composition so it could be animated as a single object rather than a collection of body parts (also explained in aforementioned post) so I could animate the position property (move it around over time). I created the movement animation for the ghost and applied motion blur and eased the motion to make it smoother. For some parts of the video the ghost also moves through 3D space; I did this by enabling the ghost animation to be a 3D object giving it the ability to move and rotate along the Z axis as well as the X and Y axis's. The usual animation principles still apply even in 3D space.

There are paint splatters on the wall where the ghost appears. I achieved this effect by taking paint splatters from my licensed stock footage pack (Riot Gear - shown below) and placing them over the wall and resizing them. I set them all to be 0% opaque and animated them in a sequence to appear once the ghost moved over them; I wanted to try and re-create the paint effect that BLU used in his video when a character moved along a wall.



The video shakes as a whole which implies it was filmed as a video without a tri-pod or support. I did this by creating a null object (an object with no information) and applied a random movement expression (called a wiggle) to it. I parented all of the other elements of the video (the photograph, ghost and paint) which allowed them to move along with null object - this creates the illusion the video is shaking as a whole as if it was being filmed when in reality it is a still image. To make the pseudo-video effect I added a subtle brightness colour correction that randomised to make it appear as if there was a camera that was receiving different levels of light as it moved around.

Overall I am pretty satisfied with the animation. I think if I had more time there would be more I could do to it to make it more convincing. I think with the camera shake I could have made it very jerky in the same fashion as the ghost animation to make it seem as if it was a series of photographs rather than a video that was being taken. If I wanted to get very serious with this I could animate the paint so it appeared around the outlines of the ghost at a given time; this would be a convincing effect but would take up a lot of time.