Beyond the Basics of After Effects - Intermediate Skills - Adobe MAX 2020 Presentation

Kyle Hamrick : Hey there. I'm Kyle Hamrick senior motion designer for school of motion. This session is beyond the basics of Adobe after effects, intermediate skills. I'll be using a piece I created for Adobe last year as a way to showcase various parts of the motion design workflow, and hopefully show you a lot of cool and helpful tips along the way. We'll be talking about several different stages of a good motion design workflow, starting with concepting, and pre-production, I'll be showing you the ways that I use other Adobe apps when I'm creating a piece and how across app workflow can be helpful and efficient, then we'll dive into after effects itself and we'll look at some ways to step your work up to the next level, including tips for finessing, your key frames in the graph editor, navigating complex projects, using advanced features like master properties, ways to artfully transform footage.
Kyle Hamrick : Uh, and then I'll have a few cool after effects tips for you as well. So when Adobe first reached out regarding this project, I was obviously excited for the opportunity. It sounded like it would be a fun technical challenge as well as a creative one. As the project developed in my brain, it became clear. I was essentially getting to create a love letter to after effects. And I have to say it's one of the cooler opportunities I've ever been given. So Adobe specific request was for a project that could serve as a benchmark in a variety of ways, and would also be aesthetically pleasing, not just a science project and help showcase some of the ways that you can use after effects as part of the benchmarking process. It needed to include a piece of footage, which meant an end-user could also potentially try out different sizes and formats.
Kyle Hamrick : There was a desire to focus on GPU accelerated effects, as that creates a pretty easy AB for users to see the speed gains that those can bring. And lastly, it was likely this project would be publicly shared. So users who wanted to explore the workflow and structure of such a project could download it and explore it. So let's take a look at what I'm talking about, and then we can dive into some of the process of how this was made. And I'll try to give you, as I said, as many useful tips along the way as I can.
Music :[intro music]
Kyle Hamrick : I know you're excited for me to dive straight into after effects and I am too, but let's take a minute and talk about some of the earlier steps in the process. It can be really tempting to just happen to after effects and start doing stuff. And I definitely do that, but there's a time and a place for that animation is a very labor intensive process. So for an actual project, you want to make sure you actually know what you're trying to achieve before you think about animating anything. So let's take a look at my storyboard sketches here, as you can see, I just drew these on paper, which can be a good way to get the ideas down without being too fussy about it. I decided to make this whole thing a little meta, uh, we'll start with a key frame, rolling in a cursor, clicks it, revealing some other kinds of key frames, which all split apart to expose a bunch of this cool internal aftereffects craziness, and that UPenn tool pulls a Bezier path across.