Final task: Personal Project Research

I have picked up a book called After Effects Most Wanted by Christian Darkin, Chris James Hewitt, Joost Korngold, Peter Reynolds, Mark Towse and Simon Tyszko. This book is about visual effect artists who are well known for their fine visuals, especially in After Effects. This might provide me with some inspiration for my project as well as knowing new methods of After Effects.


Peter Reynolds
Reynolds started his career in fine arts. He started in Animation and motion graphics. He also worked with traditional art techniques and even some digital based art, which was the time he realized that working on visuals was what he wanted. (Page 6).

Reynolds presents a project which he did for a commercial. It involves combining 2D and 3D elements. He made a spinning dollar coin change into a spinning cap to reveal it is a coca-cola bottle top. While this idea is good for other uses, I don't think this could be useful for my projects.

Mark Towse
Towse is the founder and manager of Bigimpact TV ltd, founded in April 2000. He usually writes for magazines and is one of the UK's top After Effects specialists. He's made many tutorials and articles related to After Effects and DV. (Page 20).

Towse presents a project with a heap of creativity and freedom. He used footage of snowboarders and masked them out and also added some soundtrack. Masking is a good part of visual effects and will probably be used for my project.

Simon Tyszko
Tyszko is a fine artist, filmmaker and photographer. He works mostly at gallery-based artist, in a various rage of media, including neon, video, film, books, glass, fabrics ad assembled objects. He's won a number of rewards for various works including two catagories in the London Photographic awards in 1998. (Page 48).

Tyszko is responsible for creating a dynamic split screen using two different stock footage of cars. This effect is interesting though it seems to not pertain to my project ideas.

Chris James Hewitt

When Hewitt was younger, he found his love for creativity when he started to experiment with the likes of Photoshop. He received a design diploma at Oldham technical college before he was recruited by top northern based design agency Computer Love. (Page 82).

Hewitt uses After Effects' 3D elements to create a high use of detail in light rays. This idea is good and would be nice if I created it for my project so I might take this into consideration.

Christian Darkin

Darkin is a writer, animator and film maker. Darkin made a project in which he created a 3D fish in 3DS Max and then super imposed it onto real footage of the sea to give an impression of the fish actually appearing in the sea. This is the one I found very inspiring. I like the idea of adding an animation onto real life footage.
(Page 174).

Adding to footage




This video involves rotoscoping animation. For its time it impressed its audience as it was one of the very few medias to actually be animated using this technique.


The section of the video that I find most notable is the part where the hand comes out of the comic, implicating animation on real life footage. I particularly like the fact that it doesn't lose its rotoscoping technique when exiting the comic. I might take this into consideration when doing my project.