Film Improvements

Following Wednesday's talk with Neil on my lasted film edit, I've been improving the shots he mentioned. I haven't included shots 1 or 10 or 18 or 21 as these are similar to shot 19 with the same background. Here are the before and afters:

Shot 2/3/4 cuts

Before

After

Shot 19 (18 and 21 too)

- apartment building background

Before

After

Shot 20

Before

After

By adding the window frame in the foreground and animating the camera tracking in slightly towards the apartment building, and from the information we received from the previous shot of Betty arriving at the window frame and looking up slightly, we know this shot is her POV of the window frame

Shot 45

Before

After with mid cut 

The mid cut showing the bill up close adds to the tenseness of the situation before and after the wallet is revealed to be empty

Shot 46

Before

After

Shot 47

Before

After

To do the wallet opening and the moth escaping from one of the slits in the wallet, I animated the wallet opening in Photoshop and composited Betty's arm and hand assets from Illustrator in After Effects with the wallet opening. For the moth, I animated this in a separate pre-comp and composited it on top of the wallet opening pre-comp and masked it out a little.

Shot 48

Before

After

For the dust explosion I animated a rough version in Flash to get the timing right and then cleaned it up in Photoshop. For the extra assets like the stars and little letters, I animated these in After Effects separately.

Below are the frames for the dust explosion

I were also going to try a shatter effect for when the moth flies back down to the table, so it turns to dust and settles on the table in a neat pile. I looked into this effect in After Effects and decided it wouldn't work well since there are limitations to the effect and is mainly used for live action editing and effects. Here are the tutorials I watched to understand how the Shatter effect works.

Part 1

Part 2

Although not particularly helpful for my film, I learned a lot from this and have taken notes from it and may test around with it for me reel which will have 2D animation and motion graphics in it.