Well, we've had a bit of a tour through Motion, let’s try making something a bit more complex.
A client of mine organizes a big annual adventure race, and I thought I'd experiment with Motion to see if I could ‘freshen up’ the look to the TV graphics. Let's start off with the basic raw ingredient, a promo that was cut for the race. I've parked it on a fairly uninspiring shot of the back wheel of a bike. Note the black bar down the right hand side, that's a blanking error that I will remove later.
First of all, I'm going to make an element in Illustrator to drop into Motion.
As I've said before, you could make all of this in Motion, but I find it quicker to design graphic ‘elements’ in a software-drawing package.
Here you can see I've drawn a long horizontal line with various random length perpendicular lines. The actual file I saved was in white, but I tend to build in black first. When constructing graphics for Motion, bare in mind that you cannot exceed a size of 2048 by 2048 pixels, as it will fail to render this element. This also applies to an object with a grow or similar behavior applied to it – so a square 1024 by 1024 with a grow will not render once it's doubled its size.
I've imported the graphic into Motion, flipped it to vertical by 90 degrees and also softened the look up by applying a glow filter. Now I could just put a throw on the graphic to make it scroll through the frame upward or downwards, but I'm after something a bit more sophisticated.
No, don't ask me how I found this out, but by applying a parallelogram tile filter to the line softens it all up. The big bonus is when I apply a throw, the lines actually merge and appear in various sections from top to bottom. Very cool looking and exceeding easy and quick to make.
Now, let's think about a background; head straight back to the emitters. This time let's use an emitter called “Orb’. Again, this is straight out of the box, one click to drop it on the canvas.
Now let's add our line with the parallelogram and glow filter.
One line looks a bit feeble, so let's duplicate the line layer a couple of times, then reposition them. I've also slightly shrunk the two new lines.
I think it's time for some more graphic elements. The adventure race is a big multidiscipline event staged over a number of days, and I want to try to communicate that on the composite. I've made a large graphic, 1450 pixels long by 14 high. It contains the names of all the different events on the race. I just cut and pasted the list down the document instead of typing them all out numerous times
I've shrunk the canvas down so you can see how big the graphic is in relation to the 4 by 3 video frame. This gives me enough graphic to do a slow ‘throw’ right to left across the screen. Using the text as a particle and emitting it form a point off-screen would be another alternative.
As per the previous vertical lines layers, I've duplicated the layer, shrunk it down slightly and reduced the throw to slow the crawl down. I've also applied the same glow filter to take the ‘edge’ off the graphic and blend it in with the background.
Now, back to the original video. I can treat the video quite heavily as the final composite will have more text added over it at a later date. Experimenting with the dazzle filter and using a difference setting in the blend mode gives me this.
I've shrunk the video down, and also cropped the black edge off. Unfortunately, in television graphics, blanking errors are a pretty frequent occurrence. Normally, any black edge is hidden by the cutoff of your over scanning domestic television screen.
Maybe it's my history in many years of editing in digital tape suites that makes me do things in layers, or passes to achieve various looks. This composite is no exception, so let's drop the same video back on top.
I've also enlarged the picture slightly to give a more abstract double image and try to give the edges of the video a different style to that of just a box.
Taking a look at the layers tab you can see I've varied the different types of blend mode. There is no real hard and fast rule about using which type of mode – I just tend to experiment until I've found one I'm happy with. I would always recommend labelling your layers as you go. A complex composite can get tricky to navigate through if you just stick to the default layer 1, layer 2 etc. This is especially relevant if you have layers within layers or have re-ordered the elements.
Nearly there, I would just like to add a few more elements.
Well, the race is, er..., a race. I'd like to convey the rather obvious fact that all the stages are against the clock. So, Ill make a clock!
Here is my prediction about Motion – Clockwork will be the most used particle emitter.
Quite rightly too, because it does have a fantastic look, especially if you use a more subtle blend mode whilst compositing.
Although I'm not going to use clockwork, I'm going to use it for inspiration. I strongly advise you to take some time and break down some of the preset emitters and find out what makes them tick, or work rather! Clockwork is made up of 9 separate elements. For my example I'm only going to use 3. A fairly basic clock, but this is going to be shrunk down onto the composite, so I don't want anything over fussy such as the numbers. Learning from the parameters to the arcs in clockwork, I can set the clock elements to emulate a real clock.
By making sure the birth rate is set to zero and the initial number is 1, only one big hand of the clock will be onscreen for the duration. The spin set to –360 means that it will spin in a clockwise direction. Now, back to the maths, for the hour hand, divide -360 by 12 and you end up with –30. These settings will faithfully re-produce the movements of an analogue clock – for example when it's six o'clock, the big hand will be at 12 and the small hand at 6. OK, enough of sounding like a children’s television programme, let's drop the clock in with a bit of glow and a slight blurred drop shadow onto the composite.
Only one more element to go! As it is an event open to teams from all over the world, what better graphic, than a map of the world?
Now, I have to come clean here and say I roughly traced over a map I had already. Please don't email me if I've missed off your country or island as it's going to be shrunk down quite small onto the composite.
For a few minutes I tried placing this map over various parts of the composite, but nothing worked. Now remember our spherical filter from the filmstrip composite?
By applying this filter and tweaking the radius, you can turn this 800 by 400 pixel graphic into a revolving globe – looks fantastic (Plus, you can tell your clients how expensive 3D animation is!)
So as our final layer, let's position that above the clock and copy and paste the filters to achieve the same look.
For the final touch, if you adjust the X centre of the spherical filter and slightly move the layer in the other direction to compensate, the globe will revolve on the spot! From start to finish in about an hour and a half and that includes all the original artwork and figuring out all the maths to get the clock to work! Finally, for the record it took about six minutes to export/render out the final 10 second composite using the Apple 10 bit uncompressed codec 720 x 576 in PAL.
Go to next section: FCP integration
This review may not be re-published without the permission of Peter Wiggins
Copyright MMIV
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