Kinect MoCap Animation in After Effects — Part 1: Getting Started

Hello, I’m Victoria Nece. I’m a documentary animator, and today I’m going to show you how to use your Kinect to animate a digital puppet like this one in After Effects.

Animation Test: Kinect MoCap with After Effects

I’ve been doing a lot of work with rigging Kinect-controlled digital puppets for After Effects animation. I’m using a combination of Nick Fox-Gieg’s KinectToPin for Processing and a bunch of expressions to smooth things out and make connecting pins to their source tracks a little less painful. I’m hoping to put together a tutorial soon, but in the meantime here’s a test render of a puppet created from a very old engraving:

Great News: AEFlame for CS5!

Hooray! The fine folks over at AEScripts are now hosting a beta release of AEFlame for CS4/CS5. Best of all: it’s still free, so there’s nothing stopping you from spending the afternoon making big swirly fractal designs.

If you need a refresher on how exactly this (admittedly rather baffling at first glance) plugin works, take a look at my tutorial.

Go Go Gadget Brass Knuckles!

Our new video is up and making its way around the intertubes. It’s a trailer for an imagined film noir reboot of classic 80′s cartoon Inspector Gadget. Give it a look:

We’ve been featured on Urlesque and The Daily What. It’s all very exciting.

After Effects Before & After: The importance of a lot of adjustment layers

So I’m working on some maps for a film about naval aviation, and I was struck by how far one had evolved from the starting material.

Here’s how it looks at the moment:

Here’s the underlying vector map layer:

And even that map began life as a set of even more boring public domain vectors. Everything else is AE-generated. (And yes, the size of Hawaii and Midway are exaggerated slightly for increased visibility on your television screen. Shhhh.)

Nothing is finalized yet; the map that actually ends up in the film could be more different still.

After Effects Tutorial: Edmonson Cartoon Effect

Requires After Effects CS4+. Use the Cartoon effect to turn a sequence of still photographs into animated line art. You can composite the result over a wide range of textured backgrounds.

Note:
Almost a year to the date I originally wrote this tutorial, I can finally make it public because the film has been released! You can watch it here: Jury Selection: Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company.

This is the trailer, which is almost entirely done with the effect I’m about to explain:

I’m currently working on a new Constitution Project film about Edmonson V. Leesville Concrete Company. In the past, we’ve used methods like digital puppetry to avoid filming reenactments. Edmonson is a much more recent court case than the others we’ve covered (1991), but the US Supreme Court only permits audio recordings of oral arguments, so there’s still no footage of the proceedings.

We were actually able to interview several of the people involved, however, resulting in tons of sharp, clear green screen footage (It’s also our first CP film in HD), as well as hundreds if not thousands of still images. So what to do with them?

Jazz Up Your Footage With ‘Leave Color’

I’m working on a set of short films to accompany a jazz concert later this month (more info when I can share it), and I’d like to show off a cool looking — yet very easy — effect we’re using. All the video is treated to give it that soft, silvery nighttime ‘jazz club’ look, with a bit stronger contrast for the performance clips. We didn’t want just straight black and white, though, so instead I’m using an oft-forgotten After Effects filter that’s been around for ages: Leave Color.

Fanning the AEFlames

AEFlame is a free, immensely powerful After Effects plugin capable of generating gorgeous fractals which evolve over time. You can use it to create elegant abstract backgrounds, swirly patterns that bounce around to music, even images that look like something from deep space.