Introduction to After Effects for Animation - Create Your Own Music Inspired Short

This class is for designers and illustrators that are looking to bring their vector illustration to life covering a range of different animation methods to create a music based sting.

This class is for those of you who are new to After Effects, so we'll be covering a lot of the basics. However, a good understanding of Illustrator or Photoshop will be useful as a lot of the tools and termonology crosses over into After Effects.

You’ll create a 10-15 second animation that captures the spirit, feel, and excitement of your favorite song, album, record label...you get the idea. I've created a simple piece to take you through key skills in After Effects. You will need Adobe After Effects and Illustrator. Trial versions are avalible on the Adobe website.

Class Breakdown:

• A tour of the interface - How to set up your project and composition and importing assets from outside of after effects

• Layer Types An overview of different layer types.

• Introduction to Animation - Covering the basics of animating the transform properties. Explaining the use of pre-composing and animating within these. How to animate masks and when to use them. Lastly a quick run through of how to export your video so you can share your work so far.

• Introduction to shape layers and animating paths - How to convert Illustrator files to After effects shape layers and how to animate paths.

• Working in 3D space: We’ll be covering the basics of the 3D capabilities within After Effects, This isn't true 3D animation but I’ll be covering tricks such as transforming an object to appear to change to a different perspective. 

• We’ll also look into basic text animation and finally some finishing touches to polish your animation.

• Introduction
• Touring the interface
• Importing assets
• Setting up a composition
• Layer Types
• Layer Modes
• Animation basics
• Animating pre-compositions
• Animating masks
• Introduction to exporting
• Introduction to shape layers
• Converting AI files to shape layers
• Path animation
• Introduction to working in 3D space
• Changing perspective with 2D assets
• Introduction to animating text
• Tips for polishing your final export