For this animation piece, I have decided to focus on an area of After Effects I’m new to and that is masking techniques. Upon watching the content on how to achieve this, I have narrowed the specific subject area to text masking, which is where you can see the footage or animated scene within the written text on screen. Pulling it off is fairly easy to do, and the difficult part was what to base the masking piece around. Eventually, after some consideration and thinking, I have decided to base the piece around a mystical mountain in South America named Mount Roraima. Why this mountain? Well, the shape of which is unusual, as it is known to have a flat tabletop surface, an uncommon type of mountain called ‘Tepuis’. The mountain range is located on the border of Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana. Although there are many of these tepuis’ scattered around the area, Mount Roraima is the highest and most notable. (Kiki Deere, 2021). The blog post also explains that the mountain’s summit is also one of the wettest places on Earth and attract rare fauna that is found nowhere else in the world. Altogether, it is more of an amazing sight to see the natural structure once you get to see it in person.
The video
How I made the animated piece
Before I could do anything with this animation piece, I wanted to picture the process through a quick storyboard. I wanted to capture every frame of the composition through this, since it’s a simple technique to pull off. Here is the storyboard that I have sketched up.
I started off with some plain white text as a placeholder, the text introducing you to what the piece is about. I will find some way to mask this once I have figured out the type of footage of the mountain I will use.
I searched YouTube and found some neat footage of the mystical mountain to use in the composition, and provide the basis for the masking technique. I selected the matte drop-down for the footage and paired it up with the text, hiding said footage within it to make this nice looking effect.
I also animated the faint, foggy background by animating the evolution so that the composition will have more meaning behind the masking technique.
I wanted the text to zoom in to show the full footage behind its mask effect. This was fairly simple and straightforward to achieve considering all that was needed was to animate the scale of the letters so that the screen will zoom in on the third letter in ‘Mount’. It should look something like this now.
To make the transition even smoother, I went ahead and easy eased them, like so.
To complete the package, I wanted to find another video footage of the same mountain, but showing it’s potential from up close. I decided on this time-lapse segment of the tepuis, hoping to apply the same masking technique to this clip too.
Just like the first clip, I went about cropping the video to show this part only for unnecessary jump-cutting. This should be what I’ve achieved.
For the text, I wanted to show the rarity of the natural landscape of the mountain. I decided to settle on ‘Tepuis are a Natural Phenomena’ (UNESCO World Heritage, 1994) as the 3 part slogan to fill out the rest of the video. I ensured to double check if the slogan wasn’t used, even then the worst I could’ve done was paraphrased it. Just to be safe, I would scower the source that came close to matching the slogan and used that as a reference. The text is a paraphrased version of the source that closely matches what was in the reference.
From here, I’ve applied the second masking to the text and would also repeat this process for the other 2 parts of this slogan.
Since this is split into different text masks, I had to duplicate the footage layer twice and organize the alphas matte onto both of them for it to work as intended. The red bar below the text layer perhaps details this as the method I will be using.
The text segments will be shared by two words each, with the last layer taken up by the word ‘Phenomena’ I’ve taken the image before I noticed the typo that was quickly changed to maintain consistency throughout the composition.
The audio was a bit tricky to implement, as I wanted the motion graphic piece to sound like an ambient track to signify the mysterious mountain. In order to perfect the audio in the piece, I had to figure out which section of the track to start from, and for it to end on. I also took into consideration the audio levels and how the composition’s volume will be. In this image below, I have decided to go for a comfortable level which is not too quiet nor too loud.
A look back at the composition and I’ve noticed the text not being aligned with the other text layers. In laymen’s terms, the layers aren’t disappearing on the right frame, or they overlap with another text layer. I had to perfectly position the keyframes so that there is a smooth transition from one text layer to the other, like in the image below.
Overall, this was a fairly simple technique to acquire for the portfolio. For the room of improvements for next time, I could try for a little bit more effects than with just the one masking technique. I could’ve done with some standard video effects like fading footage into the next, or masking two together to make a cool-looking composition.
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