M _ O _ T _ I _ O _N_The Motion setting in Premiere is a wonderful tool for our digital storytelling projects. With Motion you can:
We use Motion in two ways in "A Recipe." First, the initial title rises up out of nowhere to become full size on the screen. Second, we sail Massimo across the seas in his swan boat. The title zoom effect is easy to make. After selecting the title in the Construction Window, we pulled down Clip to Motion. Up came the Motion Settings window.
The default motion is across the screen from left to right. We want instead to have the title start and end dead center on the screen. First we set the start point. Observe the timeline just below the center of the screen. An arrow follows underneath to show time elapsed as the clip plays in the upper left corner. Click on the left vertical line perpendicular to the timeline. That's your start point. In the gray Visible Area above the timeline, you can now move the little white positioning box. (That's the same kind of positioning box we used in creating the Iris Round transition.) You can move it to the center manually by clicking and dragging, but to be more precise, just click on the Center button. Go back to the timeline and click on the vertical line marking the finish point. Again, center the positioning box. Now we have a centered title, but no motion to speak of. All the perceived motion will come from the zoom effect. Notice when you click on the start and finish points of the timeline, the zoom amount is always 100%. Let's click on the start point and change that value to 1% (the smallest number we can use). Now watch as the title zooms up from nowhere. Our motion effect is complete. Now let's create actual motion. To see the whole effect work, read through first how we create the alpha transparency effect for Massimo and his swan. We select the swan.320 image in the Construction Window and open the Motion Settings window. Again, by default we see Massimo cruise straight ahead from left to right. That direction is fine, but who ever bobbed along the waves in a straight line? We need to create a path that looks like a wave.
By clicking along the path in the Visible Area, we create more positioning boxes. In this case, we've added four along the path from start to finish. We moved the start and finish points in and up so Massimo would appear almost immediately near the top of the frame, sail down to the bottom of the wave, and ride the crest back up to the top and out of the frame. We added just enough new points to make a smooth curve. You can remove points by clicking on the point and pressing the delete key. Look at the zoom settings for each point on the timeline.
We decreased Massimo's overall size to make him seem like a small boy on a large ocean. But we also got a little of that forward and back effect of the sea by making him smaller at the beginning and end and a little larger as he moves toward the center of the screen. Those few motion setting adjustments made a big difference in transforming a picture of a boy on a merry-go-round and a blue-green finger painting into a sailing adventure. The motion setting window has lots of other options, more than we want to explain for a first-time moviemaking project. As you master the basics of Motion, experiment with using distortion, holding an image in place (using the delay settings), or rotating the image (using the rotate settings). |
