One of the things I hate the most about conventional work is job application questions. They always seem to try so hard at being insightful, to gage how a person will perform at work. Since I finished business school, and having had multiple HR classes including on hiring, on how to make those questions, and ultimately how well they truly work, to say I am skeptical is an understatement.
Which is why I love my work now! You might call this bumper that I made my interview question for getting in with RRV. Now, did it look this awesome right out of the gate? It was about half the length and used a different final image, but most of it was there.
So how is this one made? Well once again I turned to Photoshop timelines, which I talk more about in this previous post. But this one has some extra tricks to it.
Notice that lens flip effect? This was one of the times I wish I knew After Effects, because I’m sure there was an easier way to do it. But here’s how I did it. I created a separate psd file which I turned to a 3D file. I then extruded a simple circle, gave it a white front surface and a black edge. I then created a timeline in that file where the circle (or really, narrow cylinder) rotates one time and exported it out as an MP4. I then brought the new MP4 into the first psd with the rest of the animation and used it to simulate what the flip looks like. Now for you smart ones out there, you’re wondering why can you see through the white portion of the cylinder. Simple, use the darken layer style!
Another really tricky inclusion into this animation is key framing layer style changes, which actually there were more of but ultimately I dropped. However, the black “curtain” that comes in from the top and bottom at the end is one of those. Why did I do it this way? And why is that tricky? Well I did it this way for the symmetry. If I made a couple gradient layers, I would have to be very careful that the movement looked the same, as well as deal with twice as many keyframes (painful for fine tuning). So by using a single reflected style gradient overlay layer style on a 0 fill layer the size of the window, I was able to keyframe the change of the gradient style from starting far away and closing in.
Now, why did I say this was tricky? If you can key frame anything, can’t be that hard to key frame a layer style, right? With layer styles, not everything keyframes, and everything that does keyframe can cause some very odd effects when you hit play. For instance, if you try and key frame color changes in the layer style, usually this will result in flashing colors, caused by the computer basically having no way to understand how to tween a gradual change from one color to the next, so it just changes in 1 frame from one to the other. Could be useful, but not in this case.
