This is the video as it was when I showed it to peers and my 4th year mentor. From asking other people to watch it I was able to gather further feedback on things that I (being too close to it) was struggling to see. The main feedback I received from people was about the pacing of the video. While a variety of speeds mean that the video doesn't get too overwhelming, there were some sections that slowed the whole thing down and it felt a bit disjointed. I had already started working on some of those factors during Week 11, having the ball transition into a square as it jumped in the parallax screen cut some needless time and movement out of that scene, but the things my mentor mentioned (below) were well spotted and required attention. I had also been inserting more sound effects and music into the scene to bring it all together.
Fully aware it's not perfect yet, there's a random black background about 14 seconds in, a jarring colour change at 24 seconds and some mad drip-positioning at 41 - but any thoughts you have would be greatly appreciated.
4th Year Mentor Feedback
The transition away from the blueprint was far too fast, not giving any time to let the viewer appreciate what was on screen.
By giving a little more time once the chair appeared, and adding sound effects I was able to give this scene more interest.
As I'd anticipated, I started playing around with the 3D Bevel effect once I'd found it. I felt that it looked much better on the kinetic type, and that the True Cycles logo looked better as a flat graphic. After weeks of casually looking for (and pretending to myself that I didn't care about) a way to put the hole back into the letter A (I don't know when I lost them, but lose them I did) - I was overjoyed at finding a solution using one of the mode selectors that I'd learned about while making track mattes.
I had played around with a tutorial's technique for drips in a previous project and used them for the word 'call' here - but for the Abyss section I built the drips out of paths and was able to adapt each object frame by frame to give the liquid a little more personality. When I moved onto the drips for 'of' and 'the' I really got into a flow of taking the shapes in and out of pre-comps so each drip would interact smoothly with any letter it came into contact with. I was really proud of the process that I went through in making this, and I feel like going from left to right you can see my improvement from the fairly uniform droplets on 'call' to the one that tumbles from the 'f' and joins the two drips from 'e' and 's' to tell its own wee story.
Once I had all the tiny details sorted, I went back to track mattes and put footage of bubbles over the liquid, and added a texture to the background of the entire text scene. I felt, after having so many flat graphics and backgrounds across the video, a little bit of texture would show my range - plus I love making textures, and this felt like the best section to use something gritty.
The next section I had to sort the pacing for was the dots. With them coming in at speed, I had to find a good middle ground between them rushing on and off, and making their presence purposeful. I think I found the right happy medium by using the pink and green to introduce the concept or dots, then apply the 'END' text using the same technique.
My almost-final draft had everything ready to go. Almost.
A few timings weren't quite sitting right, some sound effects and filters weren't quite playing ball. Looking back it's hard for me to spot where the issue are, but in lead up to the deadline I was easily irked by tiny issues that were a fraction out of place or time. I was in the classic designer habit of having multiple drafts of the file - at last count there were six development files, followed by two dedicated purely to pacing issues, and four exported videos named "Incomplete". Some of these were due to After Effects pushing sound effect timings off, and I then learned the difference between AE exports, and using Media Encoder.