Motion-Text Animation

Here's another motion graphics I had to make and I'm really starting to like working with After Effects. It's a very powerful compositing application that delivers a freedom of creativity. This time around it took me a while to really get an idea of what I wanted the animation to be about. So I pretty much wrote a short poem, although I didn't get to use the whole thing. I wanted to get an idea of how the text will be moving about on screen so I created the text layers and used an text animation preset and modified it so that it would fade in.

I wanted there to be clouds, everything is better with clouds and I was wondering if I could do it in short time. Then I remembered I could use photoshop; so I painted the clouds in photoshop, using a soft brush and low flow settings, some clouds was just a single cloud, others were larger groups of clouds, with alpha transparencies.

Import them in AE and make them 3D layers so I can move them around in 3D space. It was a bit tedious getting the different cloud layers and other elements to align with the 3D camera. I saw a tip that mentioned that to solve that, all you need to do is to link the layer to something in the camera's view, or the camera itself and then, make it a 3D layer, then break the link to the object, and move it to where you want it. That way, it's not flying off to some random place in 3D space. This was fun and it really challanged what I could do with after effects in a short time. There will be more..believe that.