Student Originated Studies: Media

Greetings everyone! I hope the workshop on After Effects was helpful to people. It is too bad we didn't have time to get into applying effects to layers, and text, and time-remapping, and all of the multitude of other amazing things that you can do with After Effects.

I thought I would post the handout (attached as a pdf) and a collection of links for further After Effects self-teaching here. Pretty much all of the information and more that was gone over in the workshop is contained in the handout, so feel free to use it as a reference later, or if you weren't at the workshop, to look at it and play with After Effects on your own time. I have also attached a Doc file of commonly used keyboard shortcuts in AE 5.5, from previous classes teaching this program. You may find the list of keyboard shortcuts in the Help File (which are organized by category) overwhelming, and if so, you might find this smaller list helpful. Also attached is the outline of the exercise you did in the workshop today.

How to get help and teach yourself

The most effective way to learn After Effects is to experiment with it and learn on your own. In accordance with this goal, here are some useful resources.

• After Effects Help File! Everything you need to know to operate the program is contained in this well-written, intuitively organized, and easily searchable help file. Just press F1 while running After Effects, or click Help / After Effects Help.

• Online Tutorials (see the mirror of this tutorial on my blog )
• http://www.creativecow.net/articles/aftereffects.html
• CreativeCow.net has a great deal of superb and useful tutorials. This link is to a list of all of their written After Effects Tutorials.
• http://www.creativecow.net/aepodcast/
• CreativeCow's new series of excellent video podcast After Effects tutorials.
• http://www.stephenschleicher.com/
• http://aftereffects.digitalmedianet.com/articles/splasharticle.jsp?type=techniques
• Editan introductory tour of after effects, fortified with example projects
• http://www.toolfarm.com/jezra/display.php?show=1&Go=Go
• http://www.xtreme-is-back.com/tutorials_speffects.html
• http://www.pixel2life.com/tutorials/Adobe_After_Effects/All/
• http://www.ayatoweb.com/ae_tips_e/ae51_e.html
• 
  

  http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials.html
  a very energetic after effects instructional video creator...

• http://msp.sfsu.edu/Instructors/rey/aepage/aeportal.html
  a portal to all things AE...
• http://media-motion.tv/
  an excellent and well-trafficked After Effects list-serve. Sign up and read what people are saying, and post questions if you have them!

• Total Training/Lynda.com Training Videos

  • These are ridiculously thorough video training in all things After Effects, conducted by articulate professionals. To “borrow” a “copy”, talk to Jed, Brad, or Alex.

• Books

  • There are many books out there about After Effects, but one of the best is Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects – Volume 1: The Essentials by Trish and Chris Meyer. Instead of just telling you how to perform functions in After Effects, it attempts to teach you techniques for being creative inside the program, teaching you in the context of real-world design problems.