Ephesians scripture break
- At April 22, 2008
- By ken
- In design / video
This past weekend, we needed a transitional piece to bridge two songs. The band required about 20 seconds to move musicians and chairs. Rather than an awkward silence, we decided to build a small motion graphics piece. It provided the perfect opportunity to feature a relevant scripture for the day. It also set up the context of the song and set a tone.
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Ephesians / Wind (QuickTime, 1.7MB)
On a technical note, the blades of grass were drawn in Illustrator. I started with about 3 pieces, and created about 5 unique groupings of grass total. They are laid out in After Effect 3D space and were rotated, overlapped, and scaled all differently to look more random. Here’s a screen shot of my comp window, just to give you an idea of the spacing. All told, there are 113 layers at work.
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David Slone
Nice way to redo showing scripture, out of curiosity how long did it take for the project and how far out did you know about this?
ken
David, we typically know of stuff like this anywhere from 1-2 weeks out. This one took me about 3-4 hours total, including renders and sound design.
Brook
Nice idea and implementation… I may use this idea for some transition pieces for our upcoming marriage conference…
Jason P. Brown
Ken,
Being completely motion graphics ignorant, I was wondering if After Effects gives you a focal point so that when you move around in a piece such as this it does the work for you? I would like to get into doing some pieces like this one, and if After Effects helps with that, I might be more willing to drop the cash for the software…
Justin
I especially appreciate the comp window screen shot.
David Slone
Jason,
AE is extremely robust in the face that you can select the type of camera you want there is 35mm and up you can enable depth to field set your focal length pretty much anything you find on a real camera. And the nice thing is these value are keyframeable. I haven’t found anything I want to do that I can’t do in AE yet, other than have it make french toast i’m still working on that one.
David Slone
face = way….it’s early and i didn’t sleep much last night.
Jason Brown
Thanks David – that is really cool to know!
ken
Yeah, it’s french toast isn’t all that great. Now, it does make an excellent bran muffin.
jodi
loved this piece – thought it was a great transition – enjoyed it tremendously !
Marshall
Great transition, but I’m going to be the Debbie Downer and point out the two changes I would have made:
Hid the abrupt edges of the grass groups. Right after the “Husbands…” section you can see where a section stops.
Have the “Ephesians 5:22-25″ move like the text before it. Either parent it to the moving grass or make it a 3D layer – I’m not sure exactly what you did. Having it on a linear path detracts from the “moving through a field at night” vibe you created quite effectively.