After Effects Apprentice: 02 Basic Animation

Trish Meyer leads beginners through a gentle introduction to Adobe After Effects: from creating a new project and importing sources, through arranging and animating layers, applying effects, and creating variations, to rendering the final movie. However, this is no paint-by-numbers exercise. Trish demonstrates how she makes creative decisions and saves time through the use of keyboard shortcuts and smart working practices. Additional movies explain further details about how After Effects works under the hood. Her measured pace helps even those completely new to After Effects understand the program so that they can use it effectively on their own projects. Exercise files for After Effects CS4 through CC are included with the course.

Learning objectives
Starting a project from scratch
Building a composition
Arranging and transforming layers interactively and numerically
Animating parameters including motion paths
Applying and re-using effects
Creating variations and rendering the final movie
Importing layered Photoshop files
Understanding alpha channels
Avoiding common mistakes