The Giger project will be based upon the Artwork of H.R. Giger. If you have seen any of the Alien movies, you will be familiar with His work. Visit http://www.giger.com/ to see additional work. Click here to view images

Objective:
Using the masking, transfer mode, and animation tools in After Effects, each student will create their own Giger style video. The goal of the video is to create a metamorphosis. Each student will need to create a concept of how they would like to transform themselves from normal to completion of metamorphosis. This is a great opportunity to let your creativity skills shine, so shine away!
Step one: Each student will be filmed in front of the green screen. Be sure to know what you will be doing in the video so that you can act out what is happening to your body. Each student will be filmed from shoulders up, so plan accordingly- this project will not work well if shot full-body.

Please note: Do not excessively move in the video, otherwise the masking will be impossible to correctly complete.

Length Plan on creating a video that is between 30 and 60 seconds. Any longer and the masking will become unbearably tedious.

Size Video will be 360x240 at 15 fames per second. Use 44.100 khz quality for audio, uncompressed.
After the video has been shot, it is time to start finding objects, textures, patterns, designs, etc. that will work well when overlaid onto the surface of your face. Please note the first image in this project description. The woman has the patterns built into her skin. You do not need to do an image that is exactly like this one, but it is an excellent example of what can be done using After Effects. Imagine the images, patterns, textures, and colors slowly taking over your face, appearing through your skin, and changing shapes. All this can be done through the use of masking, animating the masks, and using layer transfer modes. If the few technical aspects of the project are followed, it will be easier to integrate creativity into the video.

Start by keying out the green screen and choosing an appropriate color or style for the background. Pull in multiple instances of the video because the masking will be used like puzzle pieces to animate the video.

If using multiple masks, click on the colored square next to the mask layer, (found in the timeline, dropdown layer for mask). The default color is yellow. It can be highly confusing when the masks are the same color so to avoid confusion, click on the yellow square and select alternative colors. This will immediately change the mask line color, allowing for easy identification.

Create a mask using the Pen tool. The pen tool makes straight lines when simple clicked from point to another. It curved are desired, click and drag. This will create what are called handles. Handles will be two lines that come out from the point you created. They are used to alter the curve and curve size. To adjust the curve, select the mask with the arrow, (selection tool) and click on the points. This will allow you to lengthen the handles, rotate, etc. The pen tool is a powerful tool that takes some getting used to. Once mastered, it is smooth sailing.

Once the mask path is closed, the remainder of the image will be invisible. This is why you need to have multiple instances of the video in your window. In the above image, part of the face is masked, and it would be impossible to know where to create the other masks without having additional video layers to use as reference points.

Once the mask has been created, select the mask layer in the timeline and hit Ctrl-C to copy the mask. Select the pattern or image layer that you want to use as an overlay, and paste the mask by hitting Ctrl-V.

The above image shows a texture that was created using the texture tool in Photoshop. Create a new project the size of your video, (360x240 pixels, at 72 resolution). The texture tool can be found in the filters, texture. I now have the texture layer in the shape of the mask that I created from the video layer. What needs to occur now is the selection of a transfer mode.

Many of you will be using overlay mode, but experiment with all the different modes in order to see how they work. Overlay work by making the areas of black in the top image become transparent when placed over another image. Knowing this, it is advised that the patterns, objects, and textures used for overlaying be fairly high contrast. If the original is not high contrast to begin with, alter the contrast using the After Effects filters. The opacity of the mask can be altered, affecting the way the images interact with each other. It will be up to the student to decide what works best. Additionally, the masks and overlaid imagery should fade in, not simply appear, so please work with key framing the effects and masks used.

As soon as you place the mask and overlay an image, be sure to create key frames for all of the options in the mask layer. Remember, the mask is to be animated; therefore, it will be changing in size, color, shape, placement, etc. Without key frames, animation is not possible. This is where the advice to limit the movement comes into play. As your face moves in the video, so will you masks need to move.

Finally, enjoy the process of creating this video; although this can be tedious, great work can be produced. Think about what you can have occur to your skin, how it will be animated, how you will react, and the final result of the video.

The above image shows examples of a curve created by using the pen tool. If a perfectly even curve is needed, use guides to mark where the handles need to be pulled. It is important for this project that when using the pen tool to create curves for a mask that as few as possible points are created so that when animation is attempted, only a few points need to be moved in order to match up with the shape of the face.