Professional Uses of After Effects

A lot of production companies and video game development companies design their own in-house software to accommodate their needs, such as Pixar. However, even these studios use publicly accessible software such as After Effects to do things we assume were made on far fancier software.

Here is a video from Adobe's site detailing the use of After Effects as a major editing tool for the movies Iron Man 3 and Oblivion. Its cool to see how within reach the professional level methods and motion graphics are, for those of us advancing our varying levels of motion graphics abilities. (Adobe has some other great videos relating to After Effects and their other products that are worth looking through.)

Animation Reel

So I know reels have been mentioned several times before in class, and I haven't seen a whole lot of reels, so I was really excited when I came across the reel of this one animator whose work I've been looking through. David Stodolny (who is now a head animator for Dreamworks, I think) made the video "Harrey Podder: Say the Magic Word," if anyone's seen that (I'll embed it later, it's funny), and has worked on movies like Surf's Up, The Wild, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and How to Train Your Dragon. While looking at some of his Youtube videos, I found his reel. Unfortunately, I can't embed it (it said 'disabled by request'), but you can watch it here.

The reel isn't flashy or anything, but I think it gets across what he can do now and what he started off doing (the pencil animation of the guy falling off the world is part of an animation he did in college, which I can actually embed. He was legit in college, too). It's the first animation reel I've seen, so I don't have anything to compare it to, but I thought it was pretty cool.

And for anyone interested in the Harrey Podder video, it's here. He also has some making-of videos for it, too, those are pretty cool.