Compositing Hell

As I didn't know After Effects or compositing at all I was really looking forward to doing this project. . .that was sarcasm.

Took 2 compositing books and an After Effects book out of the library, and armed with some on-line tutorials I attempted to do some compositing. The tracking is rubbish, if something passes in the foreground it throws out the tracking box and sends it off on a completely different course, and it felt too awkward to go back and try to re-position the sky on all the frames that were now of out position. I am afraid I lost patience and left the sky to 'track' where it wanted to.

I animated the two main logos on the building but didn't mask them when the posts move into the foreground, again I lost patience. I wasn't sure if we needed to change the logos on the front fence. . . all of them. I tried to do it by taking the first frame into Photoshop and plotting all the logos in place and then taking them into After Effects in the correct positions, so that I could try to animate all of them by scaling on each frame. But this didn't work, they just jumped about too much. . . so again I lost patience!!
Tried to stabilize the sequence, but the on-line tutorial footage was moving forward rather than a panning shot, so our footage moved out of frame too far to be able to zoom in.

Then I found out we didn't need to change the small fence logos, or stabilize the footage . . . so the time spent messing around with these things I could have improved the other things.

So overall, I don't think this project was very well handled, we could have done with having Georg go through it with us as the brief didn't really explain things fully. And to be honest, if this had been a work environment it would have been bad professional practice to just e-mail a brief to a compositor without having a meeting to make sure of what was required. I had hoped I was missing out on something that I could possibly get into, either me and compositing were never meant to be together, or the workshops have just been not enough.

The whole thing was annoying.