Watch the new After Effects Essentials Course & get 10% off BYOL: https://byol.com/afxlive
Download a free trial of Adobe After Effects: https://byol.com/adobeafx
To celebrate the launch of our new After Effects Essentials course, Dan and instructor Kyle Hamrick are going live for a discussion of all things After Effects. What does it do, who is it for, and how can you as a designer make the most of the tools available without getting bogged down in exhaustive features? This is your chance to ask questions and get them answered live!
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Taught by motion designer, video editor, and Adobe-certified instructor Kyle Hamrick, After Effects Essentials is your entry point into the industry-standard tool for motion graphics, visual effects, and digital compositing. You already know how to design, but After Effects adds a new material to work with: time. Once you start thinking in keyframes instead of flat layouts, everything from a simple logo animation to a fully composited scene becomes fair game.
Kyle takes a hands-on, project-based approach, and he’s upfront about it: you don’t need to master every corner of this famously deep app. In his words, about 10% of After Effects covers 90% of what you’ll actually use, and this course zeroes in on exactly that, while making sure you understand the “why” behind each tool so you can keep building skills well beyond the course itself.
Together with Kyle, you’ll learn how to:
– Confidently navigate the After Effects interface and workflow
– Animate with keyframes, easing, and the Graph Editor for natural motion
– Import and animate layered Photoshop and Illustrator files
– Build animated infographics, titles, and looping promos from scratch
– Composite video with masks, effects, and motion blur
– Cut out, key, and track footage using compositing and tracking tools
Each project builds on the last using a randomized creative brief, so no two students end up animating the exact same thing. You’ll progress from your first simple keyframes to full multimedia scenes, building animated bar and line graphs from provided project files and constructing a generative scene using nothing but shapes and effects. Later sections tackle real production challenges like green screen compositing, motion tracking, screen replacements, and a gentle introduction to 3D space and parallax.
By the end, you’ll have a reel’s worth of portfolio-ready projects and the confidence to open a blank composition and turn it into whatever you can imagine. Let’s get animating!
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