Production Diary - National Geographic Ident - 29/04/2016

Today I am working on my National Geographic Ident and I want to look at taking it into After Effects to make the net flow a little smoother as well as adding in some text at the end. I have exported my fish and net on different files out of Photoshop and to do this I had to export at Quicktime and set the alpha channel to 'Standard', for future reference.



I haven't have much experience with the puppet tool, so I want to look a few tutorials while I try and edit my net so that I can learn as much as possible and not do a bad job of it.

I found a little guide on the Adobe help website on how to use the puppet tool and it's definition of the tool is that it 'works by deforming part of an image according to the positions of pins that you place and move'. So I want the pole of my net to stay quite still, however I'd like the net to flow a little more and possibly the yellow square to move a little bit more freely. It explains that there are three types of pins, the Puppet Pin tool (to place pins), the Puppet Overlap tool (to indicate which parts of the image should overlap in front of the other) and the Puppet Starch tool (used to stiffen parts of the image). 

I'm not going to try and puppet my net and I will post below the progress I make!

Here I have really stretched the net to it's extreme and you can really change the whole shape using this tool! However, by doing this is have made the stick part of the net come down too low so I'm going to have to use the starch tool or more pins so that it remains in the right place. I think to make the image a little better I'm also going to place more pins. I made the mistake at first of trying to puppet a moving image and it really did not work at all, so it actually only works on a still image so I then saved the net as a PNG and animated in and used the puppet tool on After Effects.

Here I have used the puppet tool successfully and it has worked really well at making the net seem to flow a little more like it's in water. This was what I felt was missing from my animation so doing this little thing has changed the feel of my animation dramatically.