Sara's After Effects: Infographic Statistics

Infographic Statistics:

For the beginning of the lesson, we were told that we needed to find a decent fairy tale/story to create some form of animation on the statistics within said story. For mine, I chose Little Red Riding Hood, here I have listed a series of stats from that story:

1 Girl

1 Wolf

1 Cape

1 Basket

1 Cake

1 Bottle of Wine

1 Gran

1 House

1 Woods

1 Axe

2 Paths

Without chosen stories, we then had to draw up 2 scenes of our choosing into Illustrator, here I chose draw Little Red Riding Hood with her cape and then I also created a map of where little red would walk, and that of the wolf. I also drew trees and the grandmothers house.

Wipes: This is the transition between scene 1 and scene 2, and it is going to be animated very simply. I had to create a simple little image in Illustrator just for a filler piece or transition piece between the first and second scene.  I went to File à Import file and imported into the file that I created for this short piece. We then edited the setting for it and left the time length just at 1 second. After editing our wipe sequence, to put this into our main composition, we had to position it so that the middle centre piece of the animation cuts with the second piece of footage.

I then imported these into After Effects, and changed the composition in Composition Settings, here I switched to that the size was consistently at 1920 x 1080. I also made sure that the first two compositions were at 5 seconds long. Then I created a third composition, this being called the FINAL, here I made the time line at 10 seconds long.

On the text layer, I had to click on my text and go to Animation à Apply Animation Preset, and find the folder that says Text, and choose the appropriate animation style for this particular animation. I, chose the ‘Fade Up Characters’, animation, which looks really well within my animation.

To create the tilt-shift effect, we:

Need a paper texture, then we import this into our after effects work and we then use this as the background layer for one part of the scenes in our composition. We create a new composition, called Tilt Shift, with the same previous settings as before and 5 seconds long. We drag the whole composition into this tilt-shift one. We then modify this layer slightly to give it a 3D Effect, with that we use toggle switches and modes, we use the X, Y, Z rotation tools for this. Here we modify this to create a beautifully interesting image in the after effects composition. We can also use scale and position too, then we can follow what is on the screen with this effect.

To create a blurred effect, go to a new adjustment layer, then go to Blur / Gaussian blur and then add a mask to this as it will soften the effect. This also creates a very interesting outcome.

Then we rendered out our work and uploaded it to Vimeo.

Little Red Riding Hood Statistic Infographic from Tara McGeady on Vimeo.