Week 3: Experimenting with Motion

http://richwareham.blogspot.com/

This week I have mainly focused on my understanding of Motion and how it works. I have learnt ore about how to use 3D cameras, keyframe editing and the vast library of effects that can be found and are available on Motion. This lesson I have managed to achieve completing a demo in motion of what I have learnt.

My demo is basically a simple rip off of the TARDIS in Doctor Who going through a time warp that can be seen in the hit sci fi show. What surprised me is how easy it was to use and I actually found it to be lots of fun to play around with. This is the kind of thing that I hope to involve myself in even more through various other college projects & in other future projects. It is also something that I could easily use in a film editing process such as creating titles for a film.

To create this tardis/time warp/doctor who title sequence I used a couple of particle emmiters for the background time warp effect, a PSD image of a tardis which I imported into the motion library, an audio track of the Doctor Who theme to make it look more authentic and I used the keyframe editor to move the tardis where I wanted it to go in my home made time warp. I came across a few problems when I decided to include anew camera in 3D. The problem was that the 2D tardis image would disappear when I either moved the camera to another angle or when I manipulated the image to make it seem more 3D (smaller, thinner, wider, etc) However, my motion demo won't have to be done until next week, so I've time to correct a few aspects of my demo.

I think this is an important stage in learning how motion works and how it will be useful when it comes to designing both my TV Ident and the visual content for the Forbidden Planet musical.

One key aspect of motion that will be important when it comes to designing the visual content for the musical, is using the keyframe editor. With this, I can actually move all the different axis' of the tardis & make it look like it is moving. Another aspect of motion that helps an awful lot is that each of the different effects/objects of a motion project are layered in the same way that photoshop, illustrator & flash animation use.

What I also plan to do in the time between this week and next week's lesson is finish off my motion demo and do a bit of research what the original forbidden planet musical used in their visual content. The latter will give me a clearer understanding as to what my group will need to create & design in the next 2 months.

If my motion demo actually works, and if I think it looks good, I will upload it on this blog and compare it to the real Doctor Who / TARDIS / Time Warp Sequence.

For now, I'll give you a taster of the kind of thing I am hoping to achieve for my motion demo.