Blog 28 – The after-effects of After-Effects
I couldn’t get to sleep last night. Granted, it was still 26 degrees at 2am. And I’d had an exciting evening involving the sudden cracking of my car windscreen. It was whilst driving on the freeway as I ducked an oncoming stone or bolt or something. Couldn’t edit that. But the real issue was that I’d spent five hours non-stop refining every frame of masking effects on our video (a few hundred, or maybe a thousand frames? or a thousand million, same difference either way). So, it seems I had contracted A.E.A.A.E. – the ‘after effects of Adobe After Effects’. It’s when you close your eyes and see an array of skinny luminous lines intersected by tiny luminous squares. And when you move that image aside in your mind, a semi-transparent underlay appears beneath and before you know it you’re mind-tracing a new key frame involving a hand, a leg or in my case a goddam pool cue. Frame. By. Frame. I also found out something else recently upon departing the editing suites. Basically, when you’re suffering from A.E.A.A.E., walking across certain outdoor tile patterns on the RMIT campus emulates the glitch movements which frequently occur within AE. Try to imagine watching The Matrix on chewed-up old VHS tape. In real life, this is really quite off-putting and I wouldn’t recommend it. Anyway, it’s now the night after and I’m fully recovered. But I’m also ready to do what Adobe would do at any given moment. That’s right, folks – I’m gonna crash. And it’s nothing to do with my car or windscreen. Meanwhile, tomorrow is a new day. Tomorrow is the last day. Tomorrow, I present my final two blogs. Hooray!
