After Effects Week

Adobe After Effects

Day 1

I decided to learn Adobe After Effects for this week as it will work well with my animation work I have been doing recently. While in my free time last week I saw some really cool animations and effects. I found out it was done using aftereffects so I wanted to try to see how it works and try to imitate some effects for some of my animations.

The video was about giving yourself superpowers using Adobe After Effects. I thought it was so cool it inspired me to want to learn more about After Effects and all the cool tricks and Effects you can do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nonX5k09E0

For most of the day I watched videos on the basics and will properly start trying to imitate them to the best of my abilities. It would be interesting to see how my work looks now compared to 6 months in the future to look back on what I improved on and by how much.

Thought about making a live action super power animation with the skills i learnt but didn't have anyone to help me with recording, i did look online for just some basic versions of what i had in mind but couldn't find it but i might be able to make a basic animation to show what i have in mind.

Day 2

I'm starting to look more at the animation side of things now as that's what i'm going to be working with at first, as i started to look at the tutorials on the adobe website. I started to remember that I have used this before seen some of these tutorials. I started on the basic tutorials for now to refresh my self on everything as its been a while since i used it last,

https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/after-effects/tutorials.html

I have noticed a lot of similarities between after effects and animate, with some of the tools and techniques used to animate being very similar. I was able to do most of the tutorials easily without too many problems.

Adobe After Effects really feels like Adobe animate + keynote. With quite a lot of experience doing a few animations on keynote and just finishing some animations on animate I feel like I chose the perfect time to start After Effects.

I found the 3rd video about (expressions to create movement without keyframes) extremely interesting as it was almost like coding. There are probably lots of different words and phrases you can use. That was too complicated for me at the moment so ill probably go back to it at the end of the week or in my spare time.

I feel like the car tutorial was definitely the best as i learnt how to move,rotate,time and even create a path I found the option to copy and paste paths to other objects very interesting and helpful and i can see myself using that option a lot when i'm animating multiple of the same object at once. This will really help me in future animations.

While on my lunch break I found this channel that's like the guy from day one he make short and easy to understand tutorials, what i love about this change is it posts just the effect without the tutorial at first then a few days after posts it with the tutorial, giving the views time to get reactive and ponder all the different ways he could of created the video effects. Also I love that he puts an icon in the thumbnail showing what program he used, this makes it easier to know straight away before getting halfway through the video to realise he is using different programs and tools.

Day 3

I have started to work on the animation tutorial called (Create dynamic movement between keyframes), they use a tool called Easy ease it seems to be an essential tool in the keyframe assistant tab as it allows the movements to seem more fluid and realistic as it starts to slow down before stopping instead of just 100% stopping all at once.

I started to look at other tutorials that were on the website. Some were a lot more advanced for beginners and some of them are made to tell you about specific tools but I tried to look more for tutorials where you can work alone side them.

Day 4

Today I'm fully starting to combine both animate and after effects together. It seems to be a lot more complicated than it looked, having a lot of troubles at the start trying to open a file animate into after effects. Was having a lot of problems and struggling with timing and positioning when it's in the layers part.

After a lot of trial and error I have found out how to get them to work together, I have to import not open, sprites don't seem to be animating, now needing to test all 3 types of sprites to see if any of them work that are movie clip, graphic and button.

I have been trying to find out ways to get the sprites to move but it seems really advanced for a beginner. I did get it to work once by exporting but that was an extremely basic animation but after that I haven't been able to replicate that again to get the sprites to move.

I decided to focus on the animation for now and fix the sprites problem later. I added background music, sound effects and a voice line to the animation. I also added an effect when shadow the hedgehog used his power to defeat sonic.