During November, I spent some time doing Adobe Certified Professional courses and exams in both After Effects and Premiere Pro. I spent a lot of time revising and using the online resources given to us in order to prepare for the exams and I am glad that I managed to pass both (especially as the After Effects one is known to be difficult). I really did enjoy the process of honing my skills in these software’s and would love to do more further down the line such as Adobe Animate or Illustrator when I can give them my full focus.
Because I had completed both After Effects and Premiere Pro I was able to achieve an additional Adobe Certified professional certificate in Video Design.
We had a week full of training for adobe software in order to refresh and develop our skills and also prepare us for projects ahead.
Adobe After Effects
Here are some screenshots from the first session where we recapped the preferences and the interface such as how to use the tools and to set up a composition. We imported the files we would be working on and then got started keyframing the rotation and scale of certain assets as well as adding ease to make the movements smoother. Most of this was not new to me except I did learn about using functions to loop keyframes.
In the next session we finished off the musical animation by motion pathing the notes and adding effects such as hue / saturation. I then exported the final animation with the combination of all the things we were taught in after effects
We then started setting up our character animation file by downloading the resources and adjusting the anchor points ready to learn how to set up a character rig and animate it.
We then parent and linked each of the layers so that they would move together and then we animated each layer individually to make it look like the character was stumbling. I tried to incorporate the animation principles like anticipation and secondary movement to make the movements look more realistic and dynamic. We then made a puppet and moved the bones of the limbs to make the arms and legs bend and less rigid.
Next we created a character pre comp so that we can apply a drop shadow to the character entirely and not each layer individually. Then we created a new comp and adjusted the curves and hue / saturation effects to change the colours. Lastly, we duplicated it again and added stacked drop shadow.
Next we added some vignette to the adjustment layer and learnt how to add solids and masks. Then we imported a paper texture and overlayed it on the animation. We were then taught how to export but I already use Adobe Media Encoder to render and export my projects. Having done this training although I may not have learnt many new thing, it has made me more confident in my pre-existing abilities.
We started our next project which was text based where we applied transformations to a piece of text as well as animating its tracking. Then we experimented with applying different animation presents to the text to finish with.
Adobe Premiere Pro
We started by importing all of the video and audio assets into premiere and then created a new sequence. Then we marked the in and out of sections of the footage and imported them into the timeline including the interview clip where where created L and J cuts with the audio by trimming the visuals on either end. You can see in the screenshot below that we ducked the audio when the dialogue is playing so that you can hear the speaking better.
Next we added an exponential fade to the end of the audio and a dip to black effect on the last visual clip. I also added a cross dissolve effect between two clips to create a smoother transition. We then added the transcription, converted them into captions and adjusted their position and design. We also explore different graphic templates and added some to create titles to introduce the concept and the speaker.
In the next session we began by editing in the rest of the interview and learning what some of the other editing tools do. I then combined what we had learnt before to the full video. Lastly, we were taught how to export our videos.
In our last session, we looked at colour correction and changing the colour curves to affect the look of a visual. we experimented with different creative film adjustments as well as adding vignette.
Lastly, we looked at how to resize content for different aspect ratios for social media. It’s clear to see the limitations of this effect and how some would require more additional editing than others.
