just getting started

I must say I am enjoying my first week of working in After Effects. I came into this class with no prior experience in any graphics software, including photoshop. I have had only a minor introduction to Motion but that was it. My desire to learn this program came from watching my roommate last year spend countless hours working on videos and doing AE tutorials from video copilot. I watched with a sense of awe as a 2-D image suddenly became 3-D and animated. When I saw this class was available, I had to seize the opportunity. My first experiences have been good ones. I have learned how to do extremely basic 2-D animation and how to get text to appear as though it is being written by hand using the "stroke" or "write on" commands. I am also becoming familiar with the nuances of the program such as keyframes, editing the timeline to a certain length and how to render only a certain part of the timeline. What seemed to be a daunting task is now becoming a little clearer with every lesson. I look forward to the remainder of the semester and see what I can really do with such a powerful program.