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Objective: I knew I wanted to create a project purely using vectors in After Effect, but I struggled to come up with a suitable topic until I thought about how I liked the game Chess. I decided to create a video teaching people the basics of the game (the game pieces and their movesets, as well as the game's overall objective).
Equipment: Blue Snowball microphone, Audacity, Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere Pro
Development Process: First, I created the chessboard in Illustrator, using a photo of chessboard as a reference (link to it in the Credits section below). Then, I found a vector image displaying silhouettes of all the black and white chess pieces on Pixabay and used Photoshop's Quick Select tool to isolate each game piece as its own separate layer. Luckily, since the pieces were simple silhouettes, the Quick Selection tool had little problem selecting them. I also added a Drop Shadow effect on each of the white pieces to make them stand out more.
Afterwards, I went into After Effects and made three compositions: One for the introduction, one for showing the game pieces' movesets, and one for explaining the game's objective. I placed all of my chessboard and game piece files into the compositions and arranged and animated them using keyframes. I also used an "opacity text animation" on the opening text and toggled "Ramp Up" to make the animation look smooth.
After rendering the three compositions and recording my narration using Audacity, I took everything into Premiere Pro and put everything together, adding music from YouTube's free sound library and a trumpet fanfare sound from Pond5.
Equipment: Blue Snowball microphone, Audacity, Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere Pro
Development Process: First, I created the chessboard in Illustrator, using a photo of chessboard as a reference (link to it in the Credits section below). Then, I found a vector image displaying silhouettes of all the black and white chess pieces on Pixabay and used Photoshop's Quick Select tool to isolate each game piece as its own separate layer. Luckily, since the pieces were simple silhouettes, the Quick Selection tool had little problem selecting them. I also added a Drop Shadow effect on each of the white pieces to make them stand out more.
Afterwards, I went into After Effects and made three compositions: One for the introduction, one for showing the game pieces' movesets, and one for explaining the game's objective. I placed all of my chessboard and game piece files into the compositions and arranged and animated them using keyframes. I also used an "opacity text animation" on the opening text and toggled "Ramp Up" to make the animation look smooth.
After rendering the three compositions and recording my narration using Audacity, I took everything into Premiere Pro and put everything together, adding music from YouTube's free sound library and a trumpet fanfare sound from Pond5.
Credits
White Font: Arial Regular. Red Font: Cooper Black Regular. White and red font: Old English Text. Green Thumbs-up vector image and Chess Pieces vector image from Pixabay. Chessboard reference from VectorStock. Trumpet Fanfare sound from Pond5. Background music from YouTube's Sound Library.