after fects wot i did my wurk in

At the start of my intro video i used 'CC Mr Mercury' for the dripping liquid, and used a layer mask to constrain it to the shape of a bottle, the layer was just a black solid with the opacity turned down to make it look like the liquid was behind the ice.

This effect was created by first layering a bottle on top of an icy texture in photoshop.

Then using an efect in AE called 'Caustics'. What this effect does is simulates looking down into water, it has 3 layers, the bottom (and first) layer is the ground, so i put the image of the bottle with ice there. the middle layer is the water, this took a bit of getting used to but what it meant was that the initial texture of the image was used as a transparent filter that you looked at the bottom image through. However the middle layer created variable levels of refraction and various other tweaks that obscure the bottom layer in a slightly different way. The final layer is the sky, which is just reflected in the water, if i was using the effect to actually express water and floor and sky then i would have used the final layer option more but in my case it didn't prove to be that useful.

This project i really got to grips with layer masks. For the growing cracks in the ice i used a layer mask and animated along the 'Mask Expansion' option. Between the expansions and the feather on the edges of the layer i thought this turned out really well and looked reasonably convincing.

For the liquid bursting out from the ice i used the effect 'CC Mr Mercury', the same effect i had used for the drip at the start. The problem with this effect is it is extremely hard to stop it looking 'blobby' in fact it's pretty impossible but i did my best. Applying a verticle blur to the faster moving liquid seemed to help it quite a bit.

I used a lot of audio clips in this project, all of which (except my soundtrack which was 'The Longest Night' by 'Tin Hat Trio') were taken from free stock websites, i managed to find some really good ones but only after considerable digging. Keyframing was very effective with these sounds, for instance raising the volume of the cracking gradually as the cracks got bigger, or the sharp increase in olume of the waterfall noise used when the dark liquid bursts out all over the screen.

For my swinging berry i used to images from the web, one of the twig, one of the berry. I edited them both so that they had the desired tones and colours (or lack thereof).

In my last project i learned that achieving convincing movement and physics in AE requires a lot of attention and a lot of keyframes, nothing has changed since then. However it wasn't too hard because i fixed the anchor point of each image to where i wanted them to rotat from, first rotating the twig, then making sure the berry stayed with the twig, then rotating the berry.

I achieved my 'freeze-over' effects fundamentally using 2 things: layer masks and an effect called 'foggy lights'. Foggy lights is, like Caustics, an extremely extensive effect that a huge amount can be done with. Tones can be changed, movement can be changed, you really have to try it to appreciate it, i can't describe how in depth it is.

Anyway, foggy lights created blue-grey swirly cloud like visuals that i dropped the opacity on and layed under the berry. Also i layered an ice texture underneath as well. I put layer masks on both these images and used those to fade them in in parallel from the corner.