Week 4: Revealing! Masks & Mattes

Marco Polo title sequence (2014)

Mini Challenge: Scene Transition

Roots of masks and track mattes in collage works and optical printing, and their legacy in powerful motion works of today

Using Masks and Track Mattes in After Effects: mask properties, wipes, mask reveals, luma mattes, alpha mattes, creating contrast mattes, type cutouts, using footage as matte layer

Projects:

• Mask film wipes
• Animating images with masks
• Alpha matte reveal
• Luma matte reveal

Links

Motion:

• British Man Talking about Wipes
• George Lucas wipes in Star Wars
• Growing Vines
• Viking Eggling & Erna Niemeyer – Symphonie Diagonal (1924)
• No 11: Mirror Animations – Harry Smith (1956-7)
• Storytime – Terry Gilliam (1968)
• Paral-lel Pop Up Motion Collage – (2012)
• Collage Animation Project – Erin Divine (2016)
• Andy Shauf – The Magician (2016)
• The Goddess Has A Thousand Faces – Jeneleen Floyd (2012)
• Collage Animation 2014 – Hannah Gee (2014)
• Emanuele Kabu – Little Dragon – When I go Out (2011)
• Emanuele Kabu – videos
• Dress Code – Herman Miller: Ward Bennett at 100 (2017)
• BlinkMyBrain – NYTimes The Interpreter Montage (2018)
• Filmmaker IQ – History of Mattes
• Optical printer
• Matte Painting
• Marco Polo title sequence (2014)
• True Detective title sequence (2014)

Resources:

• Free Stock Footage
• Archive.org

After Effects:

• AE using masks
• AE how to use Alpha Matte
• AE Alpha Matte and Luma Matte

Screen Recordings:

• Week 4

Assignment: Collage Music Video Snippet (20-45 seconds)

Using the mask and matte techniques we covered in class, create a video collage synced to music of your choice. Cut up images or video clips with masks and animate them on screen to create your collage. You can also try out some matte techniques to add textured transparencies to you image or video layers. Try to create a composition that looks well-designed beyond experimenting with the techniques.