In Game Design we were given the opportunity to make a 20 minute countdown clock that would be displayed in between the different light “acts” at the Napa Light Festival during December. The instructions were to create a 20 minute countdown clock made up of light on After Effects. To get ideas for my clock, I created a pinterest board (Countdown Clock Pinterest Board). It was interesting to see what other people had done and there was a lot of cool things to see but in the end it didn’t help me come up with any ideas. Once I found out that the clock could be holiday inspired I came up with a few ideas and sketched them out. In the end I decided to go with the hot chocolate mug idea because it seemed feasible and I liked it more than the other one. I found an image of the hot chocolate mug that I had envisioned in my mind and brought it to illustrator. I wasn’t really looking forward to working in illustrator because it is something I struggled with last year. I spent a few class periods struggling with illustrator and I had to watch a tutorial but I figured out how to trace my image using the image trace tool which traced it for me. Once I figured out how to trace my image it was challenging bringing it into After Effects but I figured it out and traced it with the lightsaber plug-in and the pen tool. Also, I didn’t know that I didn’t have to trace numbers for the time so I ended up tracing a bunch of numbers in Illustrator for no reason. I figured out that I could just make a text layer and apply the saber effect and keyframe it. Since I had struggled with illustrator before and spent a few class periods on that step alone, the majority of the class was ahead of me in the process and I didn’t have too much time left to keyframe it. Instead I googled alternative ways of making a countdown clock on After Effects and the first few tutorials/websites I found used the timecode effect. I spent a while messing around with it but came to the conclusion that it can only countdown 5 minutes and I needed it to be 20 minutes long. I went back to finding alternative ways to do it and that’s how I found out that I could use expressions. I went into the source text property of a text layer and pasted an expression I found online. I had to edit the duration (clockStart) and change it from 300 to 1200 because that’s how many seconds are in 20 minutes. Here is the expression I used: rate = -1; clockStart = 300; function padZero(n){ if (n < 10) return "0" + n else return "" + n } clockTime = Math.max(clockStart + rate*(time - inPoint),0); t = Math.floor(clockTime); min = Math.floor((t%3600)/60); sec = Math.floor(t%60); min + ":" + padZero(sec) Once I put the expression in I tried figuring out ways to apply the lightsaber plug-in on the time but I couldn’t figure out how so instead I had to comprise and make the text neon instead. In end I realized that all the big plans I had before weren’t very doable and the simpler I made it the easier and less complicated it became because keyframing the time dripping down and the steam would’ve made it tedious. I’m proud of the end product and all the new things I learned in the process of this project.
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AuthorHibah Shafi is a Senior at New Technology High School. Archives
May 2019
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