After ensuring all the settings were correct, we exported our final video as a .mov file, then opened it in Quicktime to be converted to the correct format. The video is done!

In one file, mountains.ai, we wanted to separate three aspects  and save them individually for use in the video. In After Effects, the mountains, hill, and water would have to be saved as three separate PNGs for animation. We deleted all but the hill, exported, then undid our changes and repeated with the mountains and water, allowing us to import each one at a time for animation.

We also began saving backups to our computer at lunch, the end of the day, and after making significant changes.

After we built a storyboard with an outline of our video, the next stage was to draw out everything in our planned video in Adobe Illustrator, a vector-drawing program. Once each object was finished, we had to convert them to PNG image files so they could be imported into After Effects for animation.

We made one AE project and imported each of our projects to it for final composing and editing, and added a track. We tried a few and adjusted the beginning until it matched our video, and added a fade-out at the end of the song as the credits play. We adjusted all the fonts to match each other in size, scale, style, height, and alignment. We also changed the positions of many objects so they align with a fairly standard grid.

Initially, our audio quality was extremely poor so we adjusted the audio settings to 96 kHz and 32-bit which made it sound much more like the original song.

After beginning work in After Effects, we kept the storyboard and screenshots from a video by BP which we've based our styles on pinned up close by, and scrap paper to make notes of important settings for objects in After Effects.

We created separate AE Projects for each of us, so we can work on each scene as separate compositions at the same time. While we were editing, someone moved the entire Visualizing Food studio folder and caused an error in AE for every single asset we were using. We recovered the files, but we were still glad we'd saved backups.