- Now that we've got the files prepped,
it's time to bring them into After Effects and take a look.
Keep in mind that once you have them there,
there might be the need for a little bit of cleanup,
possibly adding some transparency
or cloning in missing details.
I'm going to work with the animated version here,
leaving my other one for reference.
Let's select the camera itself
and twirl down its controls.
Now, I still suggest that you use two views here.
This will make it a bit easier.
On the left, I'm going to set that to the active camera view.
And on the right, I'll use Custom View 1 for now.
That helps me see the scene a bit.
Let's zoom in on the left here
through the active viewfinder a bit
and now look at the camera.
You can see how the different pieces have come together.
Now, they're not overlapping perfectly from this view,
but through the camera it looks pretty solid.
What I'm going to do is open up the transform controls here,
and start to animate position to begin with.
As we swing the camera along the axis,
you see the transformation.
Now, if you go too far, it really looks fake,
but you can still go pretty far.
Tweaking the camera's position works nicely.
I'm just going to go a little higher and zoom in to start.
There we go.
And let's tweak the point of interest a bit
and move the camera.
All right, that looks pretty solid
and let's add some key frames.
Then, I'll go forward.
Let's set the composition to be
15 seconds in duration.
You can choose composition settings
or press command or control K.
All right, now we'll get to our second camera position,
and just start to swing the camera around.
You can also grab the camera controls if you want,
just to create the move
and you see the transformation.
Let's tweak the point of interest a little,
and slip that camera a little bit more
like so, I'm going to drop it down lower.
All right, let's take a look.
The camera is doing a nice move here,
swinging around the building,
giving us a good sense of animation
and perspective.
Again, it's not going to be perfect
for some of those extrusions, but still pretty good.
Remember too, you can also come here and tweak the path.
So for example, giving us a little bit of curve
is really going to make it feel even better.
Let's go ahead and do the move.
And you see the swing on the camera.
All in all, this is a really fun technique,
and it definitely opens up some creative possibilities.
Remember, you can easily tweak where the camera points
and move it around.
This is also a great control for things like Zoom,
for example, just to pull back a bit.
Now you can push this technique as far as you want,
but I find that it works quite well
for animatics and storyboards,
as well as many other visual storytelling aspects.
Remember, you can go further with multiple pieces cut out
and you've seen the earlier example of our town
where we move through the environment
with the camera going across the surface of the road.
That's this technique just pushed a little bit further.
Let's look at one more example using vanishing point.