I’ve been teaching After Effects at the Academy of Art recently and have been making a lot of new stuff. This is one i made in a few hours to a song a made a few weeks ago. For the background I used two solids, one purple and one dark purple then put a circular mask on the dark one. I then added a particle emitter called Particular to another solid and played with the settings a bit, i came up with the subtle starry background you see. I may end up redoing this and add a 3d camera so you can see that these particals are actually in a 3d space.

I then used the paint effect on a new solid to draw in the background to the text and animated the offset. You have to select paint on transparent otherwise you won’t see the background. I made two text layers of INQL where one was the stroke and the other was the fill and precomposed it. In this way I was able to add a randomized strobe to the precomp and treat them as one.

I then made a new adjustment layer and animated a lens flare on it. I also added a glow to this layer and set it to only glow vertically. I changed the opacity so both the flare and glow would fade out together. After animating the rotation and scale of the text together i added a radio waves effect to the Paint Background and put a Brightness Contrasting effect on the whole comp and faded it out as I reverse animated the Paint Background. The effect you see on “Inquell.net ‘10″ Was called lens blur, and I used a triangle shutter setter. OK, enough talk lets have a look:

So, i’ve been working with a friend who’s putting together a small production company called Digital Green Hat. Most recent and prominant of this is the video we made for the after party to San Francsico’s Greenfest at 1015 folsom called Pulse of the Green put together by CommuniTree.

Getting in for free to do some work was a pleasure, but the real treat was the exclusive interview with one of my favorite hip hop acts Dead Prez. The video is posted below or can be watched on YouTube.