Happy New Years!

My New Years e-Card 2009 from Allison Walker on Vimeo.

2009 was a big year for me. And, I spent some time today reflecting on how I relied on the help of a lot of people, both personally and professionally, to make this year a success. I met so many fun and exciting people, and my life changed so much, I just couldn’t ring in 2010 without writing something to thank them.

The problem is writing/sending something appropriate for both professional and personal contacts. That led me to look for a nice e-Card that wasn’t too sassy, but still fun. Well, I looked for a card and frankly, I didn’t like them so much. I guess the ones that were so generic to work for everyone seemed like cards I could make myself. So, I did…

First, I had the content, or copy, and figured out what I wanted to say. Then, I looked for the picture I wanted, and found a nice one of the Statue of Liberty that I’d taken earlier this summer and had already adjusted the colors. Then, in Photoshop, I continued to add text and image layers, and adjust color balance just to what I liked. When I was satisfied, I pulled it all into After Effects.

In After Effects, it was pretty easy to pull the composition together. Since I ended up animating one big image, instead of an arm or mouth, the animation part was super quick, relatively. Finding the image files was sort of difficult, but not too bad. I didn’t edit the sound files ahead of time, mostly because my impression was that After Effects could handle what I wanted, which was just fade in and out. Sort of, yes, but after this project I’d probably use any sound editor other than After Effects. It works but it’s not a sound editor – much like double-stick tape will help in a pinch, but it’s not sewing.

Then, when all was finished, I exported as a .mov file and that was that…or not. Rendering so I could watch the animation and the sound together took kind of a while, and I made a couple of .mov files as I made small changes here and there. (Actually, the RAM preview and exporting eventually took about the same time!)

In the end, I ended up with a generic enough card, that also includes something meaningful to me and New York. Not perfect, but it works.

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