My First Day of After Effects

Before this week, I’ve had almost no experience with After Effects and this is something that I would really like to change. I’ve been messing around with a few fun projects as well as watching lots of Video Copilot tutorials this week, and I’m only just starting to get a taste of the really cool things After Effects can do. While watching one of these tutorials, an idea came to me - I should spend a little bit of time each week working on a small, fun side project as a way to track my experience with After Effects. By the end of the semester, I’ll be able to look back and see how my skills have progressed (and probably laugh at how poor my work was at the start). For that reason I’ve uploaded my first animation of this series to Youtube.

My project this week was made on the night of our first class session. It’s simply a solid blue cube changing position, size, and rotation using keyframes. I used the “Easy Ease” option in the Keyframe Assistant to give the the cube more realistic physics, i.e. nonlinear speed (picks up speed gradually and slows down as it approaches the next point). Easy Ease is something that I picked up from Video Copilot, and it was very easy to understand and to use. I think that if I stick with those tutorials, I will be able to learn a lot of useful tips and tricks fairly quickly.

Snatch Opening Credits

It took me quite a long time to find the perfect opening sequence for this project. I finally found myself stuck on what I believe, next to Seven, my favorite opening title sequences. This was one that was good and very challenging to do only because I needed to do a bunch of tutorial watching to learn how to do all I needed to do.

First I had to learn some more things for Photoshop. This was very helpful to get to know the basics and even some more advanced things very easily. I also found a great website for tutorials that were great.



This should be fairly easy to remake and do because it is going to involved keyframing and some work with some 3D compositing for the objects that fly across screen.

One of the best characteristics of this sequence is the inclusion of jump cuts that progress each shot. It really fits the mood of the movie especially. The movie is multiply different peoples stories, that all come together at once at the end. This movie is very fast paced and all over the place so this opening sequence gets the audience in this mood for the rest of the movie. I will have to reshoot all the scenes of this, but the are all short and it will be easy, I found, to create the freeze frames because you can upload the freeze frames from final cut pro to photoshop. I also found a semi-helpful tutorial on how to do this exact effect. I can't wait to see my finishing product