Process Overview Part Three
Process point three: adding some action
After importing the Photoshop file into After Effects, I could then start adding the motion elements that would make this project pop. The first thing I did was take out the still shot I was using as a placeholder and add in the green screen footage. This footage had to be treated to get rid of the green, and I used a plugin called Key Light (not the beer, guys). It offers some very simple controls that process the image down into something rather professional. It takes a bit of finagling with screen strength, edge softness, key color, and other controls, but once I had the first piece of footage looking good I could just cut and copy the effect on to the other class mate’s footage. Here are some images from the green screen process:
The image on the left is the unprocessed footage, the image in the middle is the key that tells the program what parts of the frame are wanted, and which parts can be discarded. In this case, anything black is discarded by the program. The Image on the right is the final image, with the green screen eliminated. The back sections of that frame are actually transparent, but the background color of the project was in this case black.
The next step was to create a mask that allowed only portions of the footage to peek through. I wanted the “player” to be standing behind some of the light swooshes, and have some of the light streaks wrap around them. By putting the light streaks on multiple layers above and below the footage, I was able to create that effect. When I created the mask, I made sure to follow the line of the light streak so as to make the footage disappear behind the light streak.
The next process was adding the name and position titles. For this, it was important to remember the action safe and title safe areas of the frame. Looking at the image below, you can see the action safe and title safe markers. Due to the nature of televisions and other display boards, the fringes of the frame may or may not be present. Some older CRTs disregard a significant chunk of this data, but most newer LCD or flat panel screens show every pixel. Some screens can actually show EVERY bit of information, including the binary stream above the top row that feeds the close captioning content. In any case, I made sure that my titles were within the title safe area, and the majority of my action was within the action safe area. 
Once I made the text template, I added motion to it. After Effects allows anchor points to be “eased in” and “eased out”, and this movement can be mathmaticaly controlled for exponential speed. These expressions are also useful in other aspects of the creative process. By adding a “wiggle” function to the opacity levels on some of the light layers, I was able to make that flickering appearance. The wiggle function also made that slight jitter that some of the layers display.
The last bit of creation was adding a fractal noise pattern to the background lights. That cloudy look you can see in the image above is actually a random fractal noise pattern that can be set to evolve through a random growth and change cycle. This created that moving wavy look in the background and really darkened the image in the way I envisioned this looking. After adding a faint Colorado banner moving across the background, I was ready to start making the individual head shots.
