Showcase Video Tutorial

Hey everyone,

I've gotten a lot of questions about how I did the animation for the Student Multimedia Showcase, so I figured I would put up a brief tutorial on how I did it the flickering light animation.

First off, I used After Effects for this project, using an illustration created by Mike Gates for the background.

After importing Mike's image, I first created a new adjustment layer, which allows changes to be made without directly affecting the footage under it.

My next step was to change the brightness and contrast in the effects menu

I toyed with the slider until I got a look I felt was appropriate; you can always come back to these settings later!

Using the pen tool, I created a mask on the adjustment layer resembling what a projector light might look like.

I didn't want to affect the footage on the screen, so I created another mask and set it to subtract instead of add in its menu on the timeline.

I wanted to give it a more natural feel, so I softened the edges of both masks in their menus on the timeline. The only remaining step would be the animation. Using the keyframe tool in the opacity menu, I alternated the opacity of the mask between 0 and 100 every two frames. This would mean it would animate 0 to 50 and then to 100 and then back down.

Last but not least, I highlighted the keyframes and copy and pasted them further and further down the timeline. It helps to go back and copy again, so the process is quicker!

After all is said and done, I ended up with this!

Hope that answered some questions!

Andrew Czudak