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Skillshare

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

via Skillshare

Overview

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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.

Syllabus

  • 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

Taught by

Claire Pinegar

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