My main idea behind doing this was to push myself to learn a few brand new things. I wanted to combine motion capture with 3D (all in just a few days!) and somehow make it all work out. I wanted to use 3D and motion capture to better convey the feel of having a crowd of people standing up for what they believe in.

My process: I basically started over, as far as the digital stuff goes. I recorded myself thrusting my fist in the air in a few different ways, then motion-captured all that stuff and made my vector fists follow those motions. THEN… (and here’s the crazy part) I made each animated fist a 3D object, placed them in my little After Effects world, and zoomed my imaginary camera through all of them.

Ta-da!

Pretty nifty, huh?

So here’s what I learned:

• 3D camera stuff isn’t nearly as scary as it sounds. Totally doable, once I played around with it for awhile. (The demo we had earlier helped too. I just had to refresh my memory on exactly how to set everything up.)
• Motion capture is tough to get perfect. Despite having a demo on it earlier, I still had some trouble getting it to work out (upside-down and sideways fists kept showing up for some reason). But it obviously ended up working out just fine after some tweaking.
• If I set “new things to learn” goals, and I actually reach them, I feel like a pimp. Hell yeah. *happy dance* I tried all the new things I wanted to try, and I feel like a better student, a better designer, and a better person for it. Yay, college!
• Having time to play around and discover new things is just as important as having time to do the actual project. I spent a lot of time poking around in AE and it paid off. As a side thing, I discovered how the particle generator works! Hooray! I’ll be using that beautiful tool in the future, for sure. I feel like I have a deeper, more intimate understanding of After Effects now. And that’s always good.