Pro Tool Kit: Vfx Showreel: After Effects

Showreel is known as a demo reel which is a short reel that is used throught out the world as a portfolio for showing your work to anyone who is looking to hire you. In this field no one has a lot of time same goes for the people who are looking to hire an actor or a director they can’t watch all of their work which is where a showreel comes in. Having an all rounder reel is very important you need to keep in mind that the work you are adding in your showreel isn’t too long and it shows your skill fully. Coming to my showreel as this subject is of VFX so in this showreel I have incopreted different techniques that I have learned over the last few months. There are multiple uses of After Affects when it comes to VFX it has made our lives a lot easier without it it will take us a lot more time to create any kind of footage. We have learned lot of useful techniques which will help us a lot in the future when we have to add anything with the help of greenscreen .When we have to design any logo we can use text animation. With the help of camera tracking we can add a camera to any picture and add motion to it. Lastly we can remove or add anything we want to with the help of rotoscoping. Down below I have given screenshots of the techniques I have used in my show reel and I have mentioned the name of each technique or affect below each Screenshot with a brief description. Camera Tracking:

I have combined a video and a picture in for this camera tracking video, Down below I water is moving as it is a video and the sky scrapers are static. I have combined these two to add more dimension to the video.

To use any image in camera tracking we have to first make them 3D and after that you add a camera and adjust the positions of the images to see the motion.

Above is the Screenshot of the final clip and in this clip the camera gets zoomed into the skyscapes and it depicts that the clip is in motion and not just a picture. Greenscreen:

Green screen is a very important affect that is used to add different backgrounds or any animation into your video. You just first need to record a video infront of a greenscreen and afterwards you can add anything into your video which gives you infinite possibilities.

Key to applying the greenscreen affect is Keylight, with it you are able to remove the greenscreen and the characters can have any kind of background that you desire. If there is any part of the footage that you want to crop out you can use tracking and it will automatically mask the clip per frame and the footage will merge perfectly together. Text Animation: This is a very important technique that is used quite often because if you want to create any kind of intro or want to add credits in your video you will need to learn how you can animate your text in After Affects. The best part about AfterAffects when it comes to text animation is that it gives you features with which you can create infinite styles however you want.

I have used text animation in the beginning of my final video and in that I have used white color and Times New Roman to match the theme of my video. I have also used animator to help me show a specific style of the text. In this clip the Letters come one by one and as soon as the last letter goes to its place the text layer disappears and the next scene begins.

3D motion tracking:

This is a vital tool and is used to stimulate live action camera moves and it is quite often used in featured movies and commercials. To demonstrate 3d motion tracking I have used clip from sea and used 3d tracking camera.

I choose the point where I wanted to place the text and then I added null object after that I added the word sunshine and adjusted its size and color.

Above Screenshot shows final outcome that shows 3D motion tracking of Sunshine in the video. Link for showreel: https://youtu.be/xetKpuje32s