Do you hold a horse race in a field of Rocks? Do you plough the sea with oxen? You would cripple the horse and you would drown the oxen.

Wise words from Amos 6:12

Yesterday I, in a brief moment of self celebration, let some of my closest friends know that my blog (which you have wisely hunted down and are hanging onto every word of) receives around 200 hits a day. I wasn’t quite expecting raptuous applause or a toast, but positive acknowledgement would have been nice. Instead I was greeted by an unexpected but highly amusing anecdote. A friend, who I will refer to as Sarah (that is her name after all) said that she visited daily. I was overjoyed. She continued to say that it was because it has all the links that she likes to follow in one tidy place.

She uses my blog for the links on the side. (Sarah also requested that I add another link for her, of course I will oblige, after all she is a fan).

But this got me thinking, how often do we misinterpret things and create assumptions that effect our thinking and misdirect us? Do all of my visitors use me as a links page, am I merely a google typo or does what I have to say actually interest any of you?

Amos continues to say in a few words what I am struggling to in many:

And yet you’ve made a shambles of justice,
a bloated corpse of righteousness,
Bragging of your trivial pursuits,
beating up on the weak and crowing, “Look what I’ve done!”

That’s me told. Maybe rather than writing for the sake of it or embedding any old clip from YouTube I should focus my energies on content over crowd pleasing. A message with a purpose is worth much more than a thousand whispers in the wind.

It’s interesting that in a time where we have the ability to speak to a potentially huge and global audience we focus on current trends rather than something of value.

Does anyone still read articles about upcoming technology for 1998 or last weeks share prices? It’s worth a thought…

Slightly random post today, here are 2 great examples of water being animated in tv commercials – I must admit my favourite is the shiny suds ad for it’s comical value. Give them both a watch anywho and enjoy.

Bavaria Beer – Drop

Method Cleaners – Shiny Suds

I like both of these ads, but which one is better – there’s oly oneway to find out…..poll!

The purpose behind being able to link properties from 1 composition to another is to open a whole new world of possibilities where; for example, you could have one slider that moved cameras in multiple child compositions for true 3D matching in nested compositions – or for applying batch effect tweaks to many layers at once – the possibilities are endless. This tutorial isn’t to achieve anything particularly cool or create an exciting composition – it’s to understand how, by using expressions, we can link properties in After Effects. Let’s get started!

First things first – create 2 compositions called “Parent” and “Child”. The child composition will be where things happen – this will be nested in the parent composition which will have a control to effect a layers opacity in the child composition.

I have used basic PAL resolution / frame rate and a 1 minute duration – this doesn’t make any difference to what we are doing so feel free to use settings that work for your project.

Right – next we’re going to import an image to use as the background layer in the child composition – i’m using a pumpkin patch – again this could be anything.

Your child composition should now look a bit like this.

The next step is to add a solid layer – this will be the layer that we will be creating an expression for. It will lie on top of the background so we can fade in and out of black.

Right – now go to your parent composition, drop the child comp in and create a new solid layer on top – call this “Tweak”

Turn off visibility for this layer and with the solid layer selected goto effects > Expression Controls > Slider Control. Press enter to rename the effect “Opacity” and press enter on the layer to call it “Tweak” (This is important as the expression needs these to be the same).

Your parent comp should now look a bit like this. We have everything in place now to get our expression working – our compositions are named, as are our layers and effect. Go back to the child composition…

Alt/Option click on the stopwatch next to the Opacity parameter on the black solid layer in the child composition – this will enable expressions for this parameter. By default this will be “transform.opacity” – we’re going to change that.

Change the expression to: comp(“Parent”).layer(“Tweak”).effect(“Opacity”)(“Slider”)

Once you have taken a few moments to look at this expression, let’s break it down: comp(“parent”) is telling AE which comp we want to find our control, as our parent comp is called “Parent” that is what goes between the brackets and speech marks. Next we have .layer(Tweak”) this is choosing the layer within the parent composition that we are taking out control from. Incase you’ve not already worked it out, the next part .effect(“Opacity”)(“Slider”) is telling AE to take the value of our slider to control the opacity of the black solid in the child comp.

Now back to the parent comp – you will notice that when you move the slider, the image fades in and out of black – congratulations – you’ve completed your very first multi-composition nested expression. Make yourself a cup of tea to celebrate!

]]> http://jojopops.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/tutorial-using-expressions-to-control-a-second-composition-in-after-effects/feed/ 0 Jojopops New Comp New Comp 2 Import background Child Comp Black 05c 05d 06 07 http://jojopops.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/new-funky-fanta-spot/ http://jojopops.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/new-funky-fanta-spot/#comments Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:31:58 +0000 jojopops http://jojopops.wordpress.com/?p=1033 ]]>

Check it here – really nice work

Part of me thinks this is cool, the other part thinks it’s slightly inappropriate. Bringing Jesus into the 21st century with moonwalking on water and firing bread from his sleeve – I need Steve McAuley to break this down….

Here is the finished article – scheduled to broadcast Oct 09. It’s been an absolute pleasure working on this project (although it has been a lot of work), and Ricardo, I am sure, is destined for fame. I hope you guys enjoy watching it as much as we had making it.

Thanks

Director: Matt Barraclough, Channel M; Animation/Production (except audio): Jojopops Ltd – for Virgin Games / Virgin Bingo 2009

After client feedback on the first run of conceptual sketches here is our finished Ricardo – he went through a few different hair colours and beard shapes before getting here in wonderful 3D.

For those of you that care there were no lights used in shading Ricardo, just a toon shader and occulsion pass. He has nearly 60 facial expressions too as well as a skeleton to help him sway and his own smoothing algorithm for hi-res images.

More to come tomorrow…

We’ve just completed an ad for Virgin Bingo which will be broadcast from mid October 2009 in the UK. The ad has a Mexican theme with Ricardo the Jalapeno taking centre stage and singing about the greatness of Virgin Bingo. Check out the character development and sketches below. More to come tomorrow….

Check out 22mins and 38 secs for a sample of Jojopops (Joseph Spademan & James Curran)’s Impact music video for Aspects, it’s a short clip but a good one. I’m really happy to be involved with this hour long VJ masterpiece which looks like it might have taken a while to put together. Great stuff!

Using two turntables and Serato’s Video-SL plug-in for Scratch Live to enable video controlled and manipulated by vinyl, Cheeba makes the most of this technology… mixing, scratching and juggling both sounds and pictures with stunning results. Original films, remixes and music videos made by Cheeba and James Reed (Thousand Thousand Points of Light) blend seamlessly with video mashups, animations and a wealth of other wonderful and often bizarre visual sources. With over 8 months producing the set and a further 6 developing it at shows, this revolutionary video mix has also been produced to coincide with the launch of djcheeba.com the new home of all Cheeba’s mixtapes, videos, blog entries and much much more. Plug in, sit back and “Enjoy this trip… and it is a trip!”"