Transcendence - The Flow Experience
For my final project at the university, I decided it was finally time for a new MTB video. This project was first and foremost about ‘Flow’ and how I could express this phenomenon through video and animation. But it was also about finding new techniques for self-filmed content. The whole project was shot by myself, which is always a challenge as these videos tend to be quite static. The idea was to make these shots feel more alive and to make them look like someone else was operating the camera.
I used different techniques inside Adobe After Effects to create compositions and simulate camera movements. By using different layers in a 3D environment you can animate a camera which results in pans, zooms, slider-movements or gimbal-shots. Creating cameras in After Effects also allows me to use a slight camera shake to give the video a handheld feel.
I mainly used two different methods for these compositions. The first being a scene containing masks which function as a foreground and thus move when creating an animated camera.
The second is the stitching method. Filming two or more videos and placing them next to or on top of each other enables more flexibility for movements in post, such as pans or zoom-effects.
To convey the feeling of flow, I used frame-by-frame animations, so each frame was drawn in Photoshop. The lines and movements create a fluent feel, while also interacting with the live-action scenes.
