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Sheep Industry Projections

04.10.2016 by Hayley Rollason //

Once again contracting with Anvil Media, I was tasked with editing and producing infographics for another Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) industry projections update. This time for sheep.

In the same style as the last projections (Cattle Industry Projections), this was a straight-to-camera, update from MLA’s Market Information Manager, Ben Thomas, with the infographics and a few cutaways for coverage. Being the same style I used the After Effects template as a style guide, this time building from scratch to significantly cut down render time and processing power needed, as well as allowing for a little more stylistic and timing control. One element of the video that I was particularly proud of was the report spread (at about 2:22 in) which gives the market report PDF a nice fan display and highlights the documents significance to the videos audience.

Screengrab from MLA Sheep Projections — Fan of the Sheep Projections Market report

I was quite happy with the results and whilst not as popular at the Cattle Industry Projections, the video still took centre stage as feature video on MLA’s YouTube channel, sits on the MLA website and was shared via their Facebook page.

Cattle Industry Projections

01.26.2016 by Hayley Rollason //

Over the last 3 weeks, I have been contracting with the Sydney office of a production company, Anvil Media, that specialises in serving the agriculture industry. This project is a synthesis of vital information from Meat and Livestock Australia to the cattle industry. The latest in a quarterly series, much of the project look and feel was pre-established. This was also the first time I had worked with an After Effects template. As much of the video is covered by graphs Anvil had on hand a graph producing template. I found this very confusing to work with at first as much of it was constructed with expressions, this made it somewhat hard to customise and also meant that the render time was enormous. The way this template worked is that a data bar was built based on a numerical figure placed in a hidden text layer. The difficulty came from mathematically aligning the hidden numerical figure to the Y-axis scale. I did have fun compiling the iPhone App graphic, using the screen reflection to add some texture to the app screen grabs overlays.

Being a niche industry I was surprised to see the view count at nearly 1k only four days after launch. Much of this may be to do with the video taking centre stage of MLA’s website, social sharing or an email marketing campaign that I am unaware of. It really goes to show that niche audiences can be the most responsive to an informative and highly relevant piece.

Cattle industry report on Facebook with 2k views — Native Facebook posting of January 2016 Cattle Projections – view count at 2k

Jump to hyperspace

12.18.2015 by Hayley Rollason //

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AmndrgIHa4

Having recently, after a few years of umming and ahing, purchased Trapcode by Red Giant, a suite of plugins for After Effects, I have been on the look out for tutorials that use different plugins within the pack. In particular Particular, which is one of those MUST HAVE plugins for serious motionographers. In it’s most basic form it is a particle canon but with far more flexibility and options than the stock Adobe particle effects. Responding to physics and allowing custom sprites I have seen Particular be used in creating snow, rain, smoke, explosion and bokeh effects. These were all very enticing effects to see about playing with, however given the hype surrounding Star Wars and my own buzzing excitement- I went for Hyperspace. A very quick YouTube search brought up a long list of people offering tutorials creating this effect and a good chunk using Particular. Picking one of the top ones, mostly based on whether I liked the poster frame, I dived into the tutorial below.

I have played with Particular before and had mixed success. I have found it to either be a breeze or a difficult render monster, this case was simple but also beyond the tools surface abilities. That is because this tutorial took us into the Aux System, a segment in the Particular controls I had not been exposed to before. Aux System, at least in this respect, turns each particle into it’s own emitter.

Aux Systems in Particular Trapcode plugin for After Effects — Aux System controls in Particular

So by creating the star field, turning on Aux Systems and them emitting in the direction of our effect we create a string of particles that respond to the camera move, thus creating the Hyperspace look.

All in all, this was a render heavy blast to make and certainly kept my Star Wars buzz levels nice and high.

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