When we were told to animate the collage we made in some way I instantly knew I wanted to animate the missile of the naval destroyer blowing up the yaught for real and so to accomplish this spontaneous idea I first took ever part of my collage and made them all separate PNG’s so I could assemble the pieces back together in the correct positions as well as be prepared to mask anything I would need to mask.

Before I tried using after effects to animate the collage I wanted to try doing it in Blender so I could animate a 3D explosion on top of the yaught however I ran into many problems trying to do this in Blender well in the regular 3D workspace anyway I never tried there Video editor though I doubt it would have helped anyway.

The Blender collage I set up the PNG’s at different heights depending on how close I thought/wanted them to be to the camera which I thought would look cool but it had no effect on the camera perhaps if I had rotated the camera slightly it would have been more apparent.

Once I had everything in the right place I tried to somehow animate the missile flying in 2D however now that I think about it I could have made a quick 3D model and have it fly up off the collage and over to the yaught which would have been miles better.

But the missile is not what stopped me dead in my tracks in fact it was the explosion I’m not sure how to add in video’s/gifs fully yet in Blender so I couldn’t use that method of animating an explosion so I tried to make a 3D one and following a tutorial I gave it my best effort which did not work so I stopped working on the blender animation since I did not have enough Knowledge.

However using Blender was not the primary goal was more of a fun little test and play around for me to see what I could do.

Once my good old Blender try did not go as planned I moved onto animating the collage I made In the recommended program of After Effects which was a lot easier to animate but that does not mean I didn’t have problems.

So I came into After Effects with more ideas instead of just animating the missile blowing up the yaught I wanted to also animate the yaught sinking into the ocean as well as animating the jetski that’s running from the yaught since the yaught is fly-tipping which ain’t good for no ocean so the yaught had to go.

To make the yaught sink and the smoke of the missile appear and disappear I used a mask to just mask the section of the PNG I wanted to disappear and I think it turned out pretty well.

The last thing I wanted to animate on this collage was the child coming out of the sun and screaming as to say Its Too Damn Hot and then going back into the sun so I animated him appearing and disappearing by duplicating the sun and masking a section of it and they playing the child a layer below the duplicated sun.

There is one issue in this after effects collage and it was a simple mistake of me not layering everything correctly the hidden army man behind the Ferris wheel was accidentally onto of everything and by the time I had noticed I had already rendered it out and I did say to myself “I should Rerender it” but then I thought “No its a good opportunity to explain my mistake and say how I would fix it” and I would fix it by simply changing the layer order so he is behind the Ferris wheel.

For the explosions and fire,I used green screens and I was looking for where the chroma key was to mask out the green screen but Its name has been changed since the last time I have used After Effects and is now called Keylight 1.2 which I had to google a tutorial to find it in the menus.

Audio was an issue I had found a few sound effects I wanted to use but when I tried to play them in After effects I couldn’t hear them and then I saw this post on Canvas explaining why and because of this I had to use my ingenious brain to wing it and guess where the audio should be and I think the few sound effects I did add were pretty much in the correct place.

I did want to add in some ambiance and seagulls gulling but since I had no idea how much worse it would make the audio I just decided to not do that since It might make it worse If I can’t edit the volume and such.