Multiscreen effects - First draft and Edits

After looking into what kind of visuals I could create, I started making a list of things which are common with drug experiences and tried to replicate them best I could with the After Effects software and my basic knowledge of AF too. 

This is my first experiment, there are a couple of things which if I had more time and knowledge, mainly time, I could fine tune a lot better such as the wiggling plant. I would have liked to have been able to mask the plant and not the pot so the plant would move and the pot wouldn't be effected nor the blinds behind the plant either. I would have liked to have spent more time maybe changing the colours of the pot too but I struggled to find how to do so and attempted to change the colours and couldn't figure out how to do it. 

Echo Effect

 I started my editing process by adding my clip into after effects and then I double clicked onto the footage and it isolated the footage into a separate layer to work off of. I then used the Rotoscope mask tool and started to draw around the outline of my hand, stretched out the animation to where I wanted my animation to continue to and then went through frame by frame and adjusted the mask each time as the mask was trying to get the background in to. Once I had completed this I duplicated my footage layer in the timeline and then turned off the Roto brush layer underneath to only show my hand and the background in a separate layer below. 

I then applied the Echo effect onto my hand layer, adjusted the settings so that there was 5 echo's as 7 was too many and didn't look good and adjusted the decay which faded each echo down by 0.75 each time which made the effect look more realistic. I then went into the layer in the timeline and with the opacity keyframes I could control when I wanted my echo effect to start and finish within the scene.

Displacement map               Bulge            Hue & Saturation

So these effects were very simple, the displacement map was under effects and distortion which I dragged onto my footage and then started by changing what effect I wanted by selecting the red and green channels. Then by changing the values of the horizontal and vertical displacement I could make this breathing distorted effect where it looks as if it is being separated.

I then wanted to make the orange look bigger compared to the original size as things should appear to be bigger or smaller visually. By using the Bulge effect and dragging this straight onto the footage this allows you to magnify the circular area (mask) and adjust to your liking. By adding a couple of keyframes for when I twist my hand round so the bulge effect happens when it turns and goes away when it turns back creates a really awesome effect. I also wanted to play around with the colours of this clip so by adding a hue and saturation effect allowed me to change the colour then match the key frames of the bulge effect so it changed colours when the orange is turned. 

Displacement map              Liquify

I applied the displacement map effect to the clip and played about with the effect and keyframed it in when I wanted it but decided this effect alone wasn't enough and thought about how it would move and look and decided to add a Liquify effect to the footage.

I applied this wave effect and brushed it onto the spikey leaves of the plant and keyframed when I wanted it to come in and stop. If I had more time I would have liked to have played with masking this effect more so it was only on the leaves as this would have made it look more realistic.

Echo & Hue and Saturation

I wanted my person to be dazed by the opening of the blind and have a couple of trippy effects to it and played with keyframing the echo and hue and saturation effects. 

Google deep dream

I wanted to try and create this Google deep dream effect as it is incredibly psychedelic looking and something I have been wanting to create for a while. I started by placing my footage into premiere pro and then using the frame capture tool to take screen shots of each frame 1 second at a time, equating to about 50 frames. The tutorial I was following used a website to generate this effect on each of the individual frames. This website generator was taking over an hour to process each image (at high quality) and decided this wasn't going to work, so I had a look at an app on my phone which does the same effect and decided to spend over an hour uploading and generating 50 frames of this effect. Then putting each individual frame into after effects and placing them in order allowed for the footage to have motion.

I then merged the clips into one composition and then exported it into my premiere pro video sequence.

Edited sequence 

I started putting all of my edit clips in the premiere pro sequence and tried to make the video flow best I could as I had to film over the space of a couple of weeks.