The Awesomeness of After Effects

As we progress through learning how to use After Effects with our name animation project in mind, I thought I would make a post about all the things you can do with After Effects with a simple text layer.

This is a video I found on YouTube. The creator did all of this using just After Effects and I thought it was very interesting.

I think it is pretty obvious that After Effects has been used in many movies for some really crazy animation and motion graphics. Just going through videos I have realized what a vast program this is and how much we can learn about it by simply practicing and trying new things on it everyday.

This video is from Adobe.com and is a short interview from the animators of Iron Man 3 and Oblivion. Just looking at the video shows how complex it can be creating an animation sequence.

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/ae-me/how-after-effects-was-used-on-iron-man-3-oblivion/

While this can seem overwhelming, I think it's so amazing how much we can do with the program.

Circular Motion in After Effects

image source

For my name project, I needed a way to constrain a point to the perimeter of a circle, so I searched for a good way to do it with expressions.  I found a couple of neat expressions that were very useful on Motion Graphics Exchange.  Here's what they posted:

The expression can be applied to anything in After Effects with a 'position' property to create a variety of effects. Here it's used with a light and Trapcode Particular.

For Circular:
radius=300 angle=time*200 x=radius*Math.cos(degreesToRadians(angle))
y=radius*Math.sin(degreesToRadians(angle)) z=0 centre=[640,360,0] add(centre,[x,y,z]) 

For Spiral:
shrink=time+1 radius=1000/shrink angle=time*200 x=radius*Math.cos(degreesToRadians(angle)) y=radius*Math.sin(degreesToRadians(angle))//z=0 // no depth z=time*time // with depth centre=[640,360,0]add(centre,[x,y,z])

[source]

These are very useful expressions that are really easy to use, because they are set up with variables that you can change to fit your specific circumstance.  Here's an example where they used the spiral expression, and by animating both the "z" position and the radius, they were able to get a neat animation of a christmas tree.

The Power of Tutorials

It is amazing how many tutorials there are out there on the internet for after effects! If you even find your self wondering how to do something you can almost always find a tutorial or message board that discusses and resolves that problem for you. Another useful thing about tutorials (As Arturo pointed out a few times) is that you can use them as a base off of which to build your own graphics or effects. Tutorials can set you up to create something really cool if you use the techniques presented in the tutorial, and add in your own materials, play with the effects and add or subtract new ones.

I wanted to show an example of this practice in motion. The link below entitled “Video Copilot Light Glow” will take you to the tutorial that I used to create some of my name project. The video below that is how my name project came out after I played around and changed the tutorial a little. Of course you can see the similarities in the two but I think I was able to change my piece to make it my own…not to mention Andrew (who creates the Video Copilot tutorials) gives a lot of little tips during in his tutorials that I have found to be very helpful! As a quick side not-I would have to say that video copilot is one of my favorite places to look for tutorials. Aside from the large variety of tutorials, they all seem very well done and it is fairly easy to follow along with them!

Video Copilot Light Glow

Final Name Project: